Sean Carroll

Hello, everyone.

Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

As you are listening to this podcast or listening to anything else or looking at anything else, your brain is processing information.

We can argue about how much information is in the podcast or anywhere else, but in some sense, there are bytes of information being sensory inputted into your brain and then processed, and that affects what you do, how you behave.

Now, as we've talked about in the podcast recently, there's other things going on in the brain and the nervous system and the body as well.

It's not just information processing.

There is absolutely information processing happening, but that's an abstraction, right?

What is actually happening are atoms, molecules, cells doing various physical things.

And we find it very, very interesting and helpful

to talk about those physical processes in terms of information being processed.

And today we're not going to worry about deep questions about whether or not that information processing is sufficient for consciousness or anything like that.

We're going to get our hands dirty a little bit and think about the connection between what goes on in our brains, our nervous systems, and our bodies.

There's a constant interaction.

In fact, it's even, of course, a little bit of a mistake to separate our brains from our bodies because our brains are part of our bodies.

So in reality, we're going to be talking about interactions between two different parts of our bodies, how we move around in the world and how our brains send signals back and forth, receiving signals and then transmitting them to the nervous system, which then does things.

We've also talked recently on the podcast about the connectome, the idea that if you knew every neuron in a brain or maybe some coarse-grained version of groups of neurons and how they connected to each other, you would have the wiring diagram of the brain.

And so we have some wiring diagrams for simple organisms, nowhere close to human beings yet, but we're working on that.

What does that give us, knowing the wiring diagram, knowing how that information flows around?

How does that then go into controlling our bodies and what we do and our behavior?