I wrote a book on the theoretical concepts of neuroscience, "The brain, in theory" (Princeton University Press, 2026). It is related to my former work on the epistemology of neuroscience. Here is a brief summary.
Mainstreams theories of the brain are rooted in engineering concepts, such as computation, code, control, information, reverse-engineering, optimization. Living organisms are machines and the brain is a computer. Remarkably, the fact that cognition is a biological phenomenon appears entirely anecdotical: biology is just “implementation”. This radical claim is routinely taken as an undisputed fact, grounding the entire edifice of brain theory.
But living organisms are not engineered. Engineering is the use of knowledge to solve technical problems, to build artifacts for a purpose, with a plan. Brains were not made by an engineer, and the whole point of Darwin’s theory is precisely that evolution is not a case of engineering.
Does it matter that brains are not assembled but develop, that neurons are not electrical components but living cells? Starting from a discussion of our biological nature, this book critically reviews the major theoretical concepts about the brain – computation, information, prediction, etc. – and concludes that they are poorly suited to the study of biological cognition. Instead, this book proposes to bring life back into brain theory, and to see the brain as a self-organized, developing community of living entities, rather than as an optimized assembly of machine components.
See the interview about the book on Brain Inspired, and the presentation and discussion on the Neuroscience & Philosophy Salon.
Here is some material related to the different chapters (papers and talks).
- Lifeless Brains (read this introductory chapter here).
- Life as We Know It
- Brette R (2026). Self-reproduction as an emerging dynamical property. Somewhat related to this chapter, this is a paper where I criticize the idea of the genome as a representation of the organism.
- Brains from the Bottom Up
- Biological Computers
- Short excerpt on The Transmitter.
- Brette R (2022). Brains as computers: metaphor, analogy, theory or fact? This is about the idea of computer as programmable machine, one of the points in the chapter.
- Talks: Computation in the brain; Brains beyond computers.
- Neural Codes
- Interview: The Coding Brain Metaphor (on Brain Inspired).
- Brette R (2019). Is coding a relevant metaphor for the brain? (see also my blog posts on neural coding) A detailed critique of the concept of neural codes, with 25 replies (see the publisher's version for those).
- Brette R (2019). Neural coding: the bureaucratic model of the brain.
- Brette R (2018). The world is complex, not just noisy. A criticism of perception as statistical inference.
- Talk: What is a neural representation?
- Information in the Brain
- Brette R (2021). Does the present moment depend on the moments not lived? Here I explain the issue with the concept of information in Integrated Information Theory.
- Brette R (2013). Subjective physics. This paper expands on the relational nature of information for organisms.
- Talk: What is “information” for an organism?
- Anticipation
- Brette R (2026). Predictive coding is not a theory of anticipation.
- Le Mouel C and Brette R (2017). Mobility as the purpose of postural control. This paper argues that posture is anticipatory (one of the examples in the chapter).
- The Organization of Brain Processes
- Brette R (2015). Philosophy of the spike: rate-based vs. spike-based theories of the brain. This paper expands one of the chapter's arguments, that firing rates are not states of the brain but rates of events (spikes are actions).
- Living Brains
- Brette R (2021). Integrative Neuroscience of Paramecium, a “Swimming Neuron”. A review of behavior and physiology in the unicellular protist Paramecium (and here's a talk about some modeling work).