How does the brain beget the mind?  How do molecules, cells and synapses effect reasoning, intelligence, language?   Despite dazzling progress in experimental neuroscience, as well as in cognitive science at the other extreme of scale, we do not seem to be making progress in the overarching question — the gap is huge and a completely new approach seems to be required.  As Richard Axel recently put it:  “We don’t have a logic for the transformation of neural activity into thought […].”

What kind of formal system would qualify as this “logic”?

I will introduce the Assembly Calculus, a computational system whose basic data structure is the assembly — assemblies are large populations of neurons representing concepts, words, thoughts, etc. –, and which is informed by recent progress in understanding how language happens in the brain.