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To solve the big problems in neuroscience you need to ask the right questions, says John Stein – and he knows what they are

You and your team have drawn up a list of . Why did you do it?
We’re following in the tracks of , the German mathematician who in 1900 drew up what he thought were the . Hilbert’s work arguably led to the development of computing. I daren’t hope that anything like that might happen [from our work], but we would like something spectacular to come out of it just by posing the right questions.

Why does neuroscience need this list?
Many of us who are looking at how the whole brain works, as opposed to how little bits of it work, worry that reductionism has taken over. We know a great deal about the nuts and bolts of the brain, but what we don’t know is how this complex system works together.

Neuroscience encompasses such a wide diversity of people, from geneticists and molecular biologists to economic modellers and people who analyse complex systems. Very often they don’t talk to each other. They don’t get together and decide the important questions to answer – like what is consciousness, and what is the relationship between mind and brain.

Which is the most important area to tackle, in your view?
What happens in the brain when someone makes a decision? Unless we can understand the way the human brain works – in particular, how it makes decisions – how on earth are we going to solve the awful problems that face us, like the increasing population and climate change? Our minds are the only things that will get us out of all the holes we’re in.

I’m particularly interested in so-called , when people in power tend to make silly decisions because they feel they have a superior decision-making mechanism. There’s a lot of literature on decision-making, but not in relation to the kinds of decisions that hubristic managers make.

How many questions have you come up with?
We have 21 general questions about the mind, such as “how does the brain process time?” and “what is the neural basis of personality?” but that’s just the short version. We also have a longer version where they are broken down into much more detail, and that has a few hundred.

Is the list final?
No, this is an iterative process. We want 91av readers and others to look at it and say how they want it changed. The process will end when people are happy with the way the questions have been put.

Can your list really move the field along?
Einstein remarked that if he had an hour left to live and his life depended on it, he’d spend 55 minutes deciding what question to answer, and only 5 minutes answering it. There’s an awful lot about the brain that we don’t really understand. We’ve got to face up to that problem.