‘The Idea of the Brain’ Review: The Thinking Machine – The Wall Street Journal 

Matthew Cobb, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester, a man whose erudition spans biology, neuroscience, psychology, genetics and other discipline-blurring specialties, wastes no time in telling us what we aren’t going to learn from his book. In 1665, he begins, the Danish anatomist Nicolaus Steno put forth a revolutionary idea about the brain that has been guiding researchers ever since: “To understand what the brain does and how it does it . . . we should view it as a machine and take it apart to see how it works.” And take it apart they have: “We can now make a mouse remember…