How Many Neurons Does it Take to Make a Mind?

The human race has made great strides in understanding the world around us, but the understanding of why it is we understand eludes us! We know that thought originates in the brain, we know that the brain is a network of billions of cells called neurons, we know that neurons transmit electric signals between one another and we even know how they transmit these signals, but we still do not know how such features combine to form a mind. Understanding how the mind, or consciousness, emerges from a network of neurons has become one of the great problems of modern science. In this essay I will tell a story (not the story!) of our attempts to understand our own minds. I begin our exposition, as physicists tend to do, with the basic “fundamental” element of our system, the neuron. We then increase our cast and investigate how a network of neurons computes and learns, and finally, I end our story with the tale of a most peculiar hypothesis, that a mere network of neurons is not enough quantum mechanics must play a role in how the brain computes...