Dr. Francis Crick

Francis Crick, the Nobel Laureate in his book “The Astonishing Hypothesis” says:
“What I want to know is exactly what is going on in my brain when I see something.”
That’s what we want to know for all of our senses used in experiencing architecture.
Dr. Crick uses the following logic: To understand ourselves we must understand how nerve cells behave and how they interact; Next we need to understand the nature of consciousness and its links to short term memory and attention; We need to understand that our naïve views of what it means to see are largely incorrect; We are then ready to study the anatomy of the brain and how it is used by the mind.
The “astonishing hypothesis” of Dr. Crick is that “YOU”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. It does not come easily to most people to believe that I am the detailed behavior of a set of nerve cells, however many there may be and however intricate their interactions. “I know I am in there somewhere, looking out on the world.”

How did this extraordinary neuronal machine (called the brain) come to be? It was not designed by an architect or an engineer, even though it does a fantastic job in a small space and uses very little energy. The genes we received from our parents have, over millions of years, been reshaped by the experience of our distant ancestors. At birth our brain is not a blank slate, but an elaborate structure with many parts already in place, waiting for our minds to tune this rough-and-ready apparatus until it can do a precision job.