We’ve learned so much about our planet, and space, but the operation of our own brains remains a mystery to us. There is so much we don’t know about the human brain. Our methods of understanding the brain will surely seem crude as neuroscience takes off, aided by technology, but also formed by technology as digital minds teach us how intelligence is born. In the new series of Cosmos, they say, “Our brains are made from the same stuff as our feet. How do we turn atomic elements into consciousness, music, love, microbiology, astrophysics?”

For instance, humans engaged in selective breeding for millennia before we knew a thing about genetics. Gregor Mendel’s peas and Punnett squares were a great leap forward in our understanding of genes – a good start, but just a first step in the vast leaps forward to come. But compared to the ability for scientists to sequence the human genome and recombine DNA, it was positively quaint. 

When it comes to our brains, we have a user’s understanding of the features, but we don’t know how to write the code. Thoughts forming? Music being written?  Dreams? Sharing an emotional experience? Consciousness? We know almost nothing about some of the most common experiences we have every day. We’re like people breathing all day who don’t know why we need to breathe.

We have hardly begun to be able to study the human brain, and I think there is much that medicine will discover in the future. We’re not much further advanced than taking pictures of brain activity, but see very little of what the brain is actually doing when we think, or meditate, or have emotions. Our brains have one thousand trillion neural connections, about 4 billion books’ worth of information. Could there come a time where we are making the most of that kind of capacity?The prospect of computer-assisted human intelligence is intriguing: What if human brains had instantaneous access to all of the information on the internet? 

And – what will artificial intelligence teach us about the nature of intelligence? It seems we are capable of making machines that are better than practically everything than we are. Where will this lead? It’s a bizarre path of contemplation that I’m ill-equipped to speculate on, but we may soon be asking ourselves serious questions about the nature of consciousness and what constitutes intelligence. I hate to quote Elon Musk, but I hear him when he says, “I hope the machines will decide to be nice to us.”

In the meantime, meditation offers us a user’s glimpse into how our minds work. We’re not capable of understanding much, but the tools we have to tinker with our minds now – like meditation and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy – they are pretty cool, and are available to us today, no need to wait for medical breakthroughs. It’s a powerful thing to guide your brain instead of being jerked around by it. 

I’m excited for what science will teach us about our most valuable asset, our big human brains. The brain learning to understand itself. I hope that within my lifetime, the scientific community learns how to do more than map the location of activity in the brain. What could be next? Recording video of thoughts, that can be shared with others? Capturing dreams? Emotions engineering? All of this sounds like it might be scary. Also, it might be awesome. It might be both. Here we go.