the common sense resided in the front chamber, where the five senses converge, along with the imagination, which retains images after their owners have departed. In the middle chamber, the intellectual faculty operates, assembling and separating images in our brains; that is, it can combine images that did not come together in direct sensory perception. Finally, in the back chamber resided the memory, the repository of meanings. One of the most remarkable aspects of this system was a faculty that Ibn Sina gave the intriguing name "illusion," placing it at the far end of the middle chamber. He illustrated it with a remarkably clever example that became one of the most famous philosophical aphorisms of that era: a sheep sees a wolf and runs away from it, even though no one has told it that it is its enemy. How did it know this? There must be an "inner faculty" that inspired it.
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In the language of his time, Ibn Sina was describing what neuroscientists today call innate fear, whose neural circuits they trace cell by cell. More than a thousand years later, his question remains, but in a much more precise form. Scientists no longer ask which chamber memory resides in, but which specific cell stores a particular memory, and which one creates fear or joy. Moreover, scientists are now able—at least theoretically—to control those cells.
It is a series of developments that, if Ibn Sina had seen them, he would have been astonished, and perhaps he would have trembled with fear at this amazing ability, and perhaps he would have said to himself: What power would I possess, if I could control the brains of humans?
The above was the essence of the Nobel Assembly’s announcement at the Karolinska Institute, awarding the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Karl Deisroth of Stanford University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the United States, Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University of Berlin, and Georg Nagel of the University of Würzburg in Germany, for “their discoveries concerning the control of ion channels by light and optogenetics.”
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