It has long been accepted that the brain is an information-processing machine, storing and evaluating, though the relationship between this neural computer and what we understand as "the mind" is less clear. But now Gerald Edelman believes he has made the connection, and in doing so has challenged the existing view of the brain itself.

"It's the first radically biological theory of the mind," says neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks. Edelman pictures the brain not as a computer but as an evolving ecosystem of competing groups of cells. In his "neural Darwinism", just as natural selection hones a species to fit its habitat, so "neural selection" helps gear the brain to its environment.

This film explores the implications of Edelman's radical theories.

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