¿Qué nos hace inteligentes?

We know our circulatory and digestive systems quite well, but the same is not true of the brain, although it is undoubtedly our basic survival tool. How to explain the origin of such significant mental qualities in humans as memory, intelligence and consciousness? This book takes on this challenge from a fascinating perspective that, recently described as complexity or emergence, involves a scientific method that has already successfully clarified difficult aspects of nature, such as solidification, magnetism, and superconductivity, and now explores other phenomena. cooperative, such as the spread of disease and the structures and functions of the brain. With this objective and in an accessible way, this essay starts with a careful analysis of the local relationships between the components of the system under study -which could be spins, bosons, molecules, neurons or living entities- until it shows how they are established. conflicts that are resolved by inducing a complex and advantageous global order with surprising critical and chaotic aspects. The net result is a coherent set of images that are faithful approximations of reality described by a broad phenomenology that is now studied in sociology, biology, and neuroscience with powerful new methods of observation and computation.