Many of us now take for granted the routine extraction of information about the mind and brain, but it is a fairly recent phenomena. For most of history, the software of the mind was a deep mystery. True, people long suspected that the tissue behind their eyes was somehow responsible for the decisions they made and the emotions they felt.
Everything we know about the world comes to us through our brain. Yet for each of us our own conscious mental world of thoughts and feelings is isolated and private. Despite several centuries of research on the brain, communication through language or gesture remains the only way we can discover the conscious thoughts and experiences of others.
