Heady topics: By placing electrodes directly on the brain of a patient undergoing surgery, researchers can record brain activity and watch on a computer screen as the mind receives, processes, and produces information.

The brain delights in making rules and breaking them in search of higher truth. Silvia A. Bunge at Helen Wills studies the supposed top of the rule-making hierarchy: the anterior prefrontal cortex. “Sometimes the brain chooses to break the rules it has formed,” she says. “Knowing how it knows things is exactly our problem.” The brain’s experience, her work has shown, lays down rules and habits that are seemingly firm, but the various layers develop at vastly different rates. So if caught early, perhaps certain tendencies could be diverted, even steering an individual from a life of crime. Bunge believes, for example, that a higher level of vocabulary spoken in a household can grow a better brain.

Interest in how the mind’s rules are formed and reformed has already spawned hybrid disciplines such as neurolaw (the brain and crime), neuroeconomics (why your brain chooses one thing over another), even neuromarketing (you don’t want to know). The military is said to be interested, modeling a helmet that could provide stimulation to keep soldiers awake, possibly even prevent post-traumatic stress by erasing some memory of battle.

“We have to proceed with caution and humility,” says Bunge. “There is so much that we don’t know, and what we do know will be superceded.”

Future research, like everything else in the future, will arrive consisting mostly of the past. One of the most difficult aspects in contemplating the model of the oscillating, interacting, rule-making and -breaking brain is to stop thinking of Descartes’s soul, resting on the pineal gland and pulling the levers. Or, to update the metaphor in more Turing-esque terms, the challenge is to think about this computer as running without any operating system. Today’s metaphor is closer to the Internet, an infinite network of nodes, operating both independently and in some kind of unmanaged, collective way.

The anterior prefrontal cortex sits atop the brain’s hierarchy and contains the greatest “arborization,” or branching, of nerve dendrites. That means it is likely integrating the most information, sorting one idea from another—but that does not mean it is in charge. “It is a network of regions, but that does not mean it is its own controller,” Bunge says.

The Cartesian model will likely give way to some kind of quantum understanding of the brain, where time becomes slippery and rules bend as much as they differ. One thing is certain; the search for understanding will have its rewards. The anterior prefrontal cortex may, it seems, receive a dose of pleasure-inducing dopamine from one of the brain’s more “primitive” regions when a new rule is successfully found. This moment of happiness may be a kind of aesthetic bliss that we feel when the world is seen in a more orderly way, or when a poetic truth is revealed.

Quentin Hardy, the Silicon Valley bureau chief of Forbes magazine, lectures at Berkeley’s School of Information Management and Systems. A regular contributor to California magazine, he has written about the future of search engines and about conservative law professor John Yoo.

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