In a building that looks, from the outside, like the villain's lair in an early James Bond film, a robot moves around. Called Darwin XI, it is the brainchild of Gerald Edelman. The building is the Neurosci-ences Institute in San Diego, California, and Dr Edelman is one of an eclectic group of researchers-some of them neurologists and some philosophers-who are trying to explain what is, perhaps, the biggest mystery of the human brain: the nature of consciousness. His approach is to build machines run by computer programs that work the way he thinks that brains work, and then see what happens.
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