Categorization in the Brain

Professor Earl Miller discusses the importance of the brain's ability to categorize objects.

Why was the discovery of categories in the brain important? Because, categories are what provides us with our basic knowledge of how the world works. If you want to figure out how the brain works as an intelligent goal-directed machine, we have to understand where and how this information is represented in the brain. It's our first step into really getting down into the detailed mechanisms of how categories and other knowledge is acquired in the brain and importantly what happens in a dysfunctional brain that loses this information.