[The final chapter of the book] sketch a few facts about animal brains that have inspired some of the properties of our vehicles, and their behavior … - Valentino Braitenberg

Imagine the inside of St. Peter’s in Rome filled with a huge quantity of fibers around a millimeter in diameter that crisscross the building in every direction creating a firm mat – then you have an idea of what the brain looks like when magnified a thousand times.

A psychological consequence of this is the following: when we analyze a mechanism we tend to over estimate its complexity.

A structure made up of fine threads, so many and so fine that even the strongest magnification of the microscope was hardly sufficient to allow all of them to be seen clearly. Some of the threads ran together in bundles and in layers in specific directions; others lay seemingly randomly distributed every which way through the tissue. Embedded in this felted mass of fibers, it was possible to discern spherical structures, the nuclei of the nerve cells...