One of the most enlightening and exciting sections of the book, The Frontiers of Complexity, The Search for Order in a Chaotic World, 1995, by Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield, is near its end, in "Appendix: Mind-Reading", dealing with that complex structure, the brain, and those complex processes, thinking, imagining, perceiving, etc.

(p. 351)"... Xiaoping Hu and colleagues at the University of Minnesota's Magnetic Resonance Research have witnessed the imagination at work. The [Magnetic Resonance Imagery] scanner showed that centers of the brain responsible for vision were activated when subjects used their imagination, although the brain activity was approximately half as much as when they actually looked. The same team has revealed a similar phenomenon in the sound-processing centers of the brain when subjects were asked to imagine saying words. And they also found a part of the brain that is involved in forming a mental picture or map, situated in the fissure between the parietal and occipital lobes. This region of the brain was revealed when subjects were asked to imagine navigatng through their own homes. In one case, a Japanese taxi driver who had lost the ability to navigate after receiving a head wound was found to have brain damage in this same region."

And we're told that brain activity "occurs with fantastic speed. For example, from the moment an image is projected on a screen it takes about thirty milliseconds [30 one-thousands of a second] to reach the specialized vision processing regions in the cortex. Until now, most scanners have been too slow to capture a thought on the wing. Not any longer. Ritta Salmelin and her colleages at the Helsinki University of Technology gave a groundbreaking demonstration of how a thought can be seen as a wave of neural activity rippling from the back to the front of the head, through both hemispheres of the brain [graph enclosed in book]. The six subjects of their study were carrying out a process we are all familiar with, that of naming a picture -- for instance, saying 'cat' on seeing a line drawing of a feline. The measurement relies on the rapidly changing magnetic field generated by the electrical activity within the conscious brain. Called magnetoencephalography, or MEG [to be compared with the long used but limited, I>electroencephalography or EEG], the method was first demonstrated in 1968 when David Cohen at the Massachusetts of Technology showed that it was possible to record magnetic signals generated when currents flow in the brain. The technique avoids the principal problem of using EEG, which is the blurring of electrical signals due to intervening tissue. Magnetic fields pass through nonmagnetic materials such as brains without any distortion, enabling us to monitor rapid changes in neural activity to within a millisecond."

As one researcher remarks, "It is absolutely astounding .... We can see the brain working in real time."