The Latent Brain: The New Science of How We Think, Feel, and Act

By Mark Humphries

A celebrated neuroscientist presents a cutting-edge hypothesis that puts us on the doorstep of a full understanding of our minds

Mark Humphries starts THE LATENT BRAIN with a confession: ‘I’ve lost faith in the neuron’. For a leading computational neuroscientist who has devoted years to doggedly tracking neurons, this is a startling statement. But his research has inexorably led him to the realization that we will not understand the brain by looking at individual neurons. We are looking at the wrong level.

Yet this realization is not a despairing one. Rather, it opens the door to one of the biggest opportunities in neuroscience to date: a theory that Humphries has dubbed the ‘latent brain hypothesis’. He proposes that complex networks of neurons carry a far simpler latent signal (a football-match chant is a latent signal, for example – thousands of people singing with countless individual variations, yet we still hear the single song they sing together). These latent signals, he argues, represent how we really think and act and may even be the closest thing to what ‘we’ actually are.

The extraordinary explanatory power of the latent-brain hypothesis has the potential to spark a breakthrough in neuroscience research. But most exciting of all, it suggests we are potentially further towards understanding our minds than anyone has dared hope.