Charles Vest, the president of MIT, has recently developed a list of
important unanswered questions in science. Several of them are of
direct interest to neuroscientists, and to researchers and
technologists in many applied fields such as medicine and artificial
intelligence.
"The mind. We do not know how we learn and remember, or how we think
and communicate. We do not yet know the chemical or physical
nature of storage of information in the brain. We do not know where
in the brain information is stored, how we retrieve it or whether
there are limits to the amount we can store. We do not understand the
relationship between language and thought. Can we have thoughts that
cannot be expressed in words? Can everything that can be expressed in
one language be expressed in any other language as well?"
AJR
