Scientists Map the Brain, Gene by Gene | Wired.com
“There’s something ironic about Allen, cofounder of a software empire, funding an exhaustive atlas of our neural hardware. (He established the institute with a donation of $100 million.) For decades, many cognitive scientists insisted that the physical brain was largely irrelevant to the study of the mind. It didn’t matter whether the human operating system was running on a real cortex or a set of silicon microchips—the software was everything. Given Allen’s background—this was the man who helped develop MS-DOS 1.0, after all—he might have been expected to ally with the software crowd in the belief that the 1s and 0s were more important than the anatomical details. Instead, Allen decided that our operating system could run only on one very particular kind of computer. “There are so many intricacies to our brain that won’t be understood unless we start to look at the system as a whole,” he says. “All these different details don’t operate in isolation. But how do they work together to create such a powerful machine?”
According to this paragraph and to the rest of the article, it appears that scientist simply could not imagine the atlas map of the brain because they separate the “hardware” of the brain, from the “software” of thoughts. Even based on past scientific discoveries, there is now a strong metafor between our human body and network or technics. And it is no more the body which serve to explain the technics but technics that fit on human… The disruptive idea of Allen imagine another human body, different of simple machines.
