The bounded brain: toward quantitative neuroanatomy

Abstract

An idea that human cognitive resources are virtually without limit turns up at all levels of mind/brain science. This tacit unbounded-resource assumption has paradoxical consequences in neuroscience, particularly involving the quantitative incoherence of some key anatomical studies of cortical connectivity resources: cortical sheet area, synaptic density there, and giant axonic arborizations in visual cortex. This inattention to quantitative consistency checking in neuroanatomy appears to stem from, as a notable instance, something of the nonspatial character of the Cartesian concept of mind being extended to the brain as physical structure.