I’ve always liked gadgets. I can’t quite tell you why but really I think from when I was about four years old. I used to, I remember, just about remember, whether one actually remembers or whether one was told it, one never knows, that I invented a machine for electrocuting our maid at the time, and it was simply bits of wood with pieces of string pretending to be wires, you see, and of course she pretended that she was electrocuted, the whole bit, and that was a sort of game, I remember, you know, from when I was very, very small, probably about four. And I’ve always liked to try to invent things and make things and I think if one is interested in, you know, in sort of philosophy and abstract ideas, it’s a very good thing to try to be a bit practical and make things at the same time and I actually think, this is quite a deep point, that some knowledge of gadgets is really important in thinking about the brain because the brain is a gadget. In other words, it’s a physical mechanism with interacting parts and the logic of mechanisms and electronic system applies, I think, to thinking about the brain. Let me give you an example. If you’ve got a radio and you take part of it out, remove it, the radio might howl, it might go whooo like this but it doesn’t mean that that part in the radio was a suppressor for howling. A lot of neurologists think of when you remove something and then you get a symptom, that that part of the brain that had been removed was actually preventing that symptom, but I don’t think it’s like that. What happens is this, when you remove part of a machine or gadget, if you like, or the brain, you’ve then got a modified total system, simply a different system but it’s working with all those other parts without that one and each of the remaining parts work differently because they’re in a different internal environment. Now, this is very important when you think of functioning, localising the function of different parts of the brain, you can say that vision is here, if you like, and that memory is here, this sort of thing, and planning for the future is here, like old phrenology, very, very broadly this is correct, but to try to deduce what each bit of the brain is doing by ablating as it’s called, removing bits of it, has this logical problem, and I actually pointed this out. It’s my first paper, to a very early meeting on what became artificial intelligence. I think at that time it was called cybernetics at the National Physical Laboratory and I think this argument is a really important one, how do you localise function? And now we’ve got brain imaging, FMRI, magnetic imaging, where you’re thinking about something, seeing something, different bits of the brain become active, if you like, they light up, how do you relate the activity increased in that bit of the brain to what is really going on in the whole brain? You’ve got the same sort of problem. It’s not, as the old phrenologists thought, that you got each function localised in a specific way like sardines in a tin, if you like, because they interact with each other so I think experiencing electronics and gadgets and mechanical things, is very helpful for neurology and for thinking about the brain which is a machine, interacting machine, and if you can’t find out how a gadget works by removing bits of it, how is one going to understand how the brain works by removing bits of it? Or even by recording from bits of it or seeing bits of it light up. There’s the old joke that if you present an elephant to a load of blind people, they’ll feel different bits of it and they get completely different ideas about what an elephant is because one would experience a bit of a trunk, another a bit of the foot, completely different, but they have no idea what these bits actually mean added up and it’s true with a sighted person and it’s true in science or neurology. There’s a huge problem and I think, you know, playing with gadgets is a tremendous help for thinking about neurology and brain function.