Rafael Yuste, Spanish neuroscientist, director of the Center for Neurotechnology at Columbia University and creator of the BRAIN initiative, presents his first popular science book: The Brain, the Theater of the World (El cerebro, el teatro del mundo).
Yuste invites us on a fascinating journey through modern neuroscience to uncover one of the greatest mysteries of science: how eighty billion neurons organize themselves to create the human mind. The author proposes a true paradigm shift in the study of the brain by understanding it through neural networks. His theory, “The Theater of the World,” conceives the brain as a future-prediction machine that uses neural networks to generate a model of the world as if it were a virtual reality prototype.
Through the account of major discoveries by scientists such as Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Rafael Lorente de Nó, Thomas Graham Brown, Ethel Browne, Rita Levi-Montalcini, and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Yuste reveals, in a simple and entertaining style, what the nervous system is, how it arose in evolution, and how the brain uses the senses to predict the future and choose an intelligent action.
For Yuste, by understanding the mysteries of the brain, we stand at the dawn of a new renaissance, a new humanism that will allow us to take a historic step to help future generations project a better world.
