Human beings have always appealed to the technologies of the day to better understand themselves. Freud, for example, who came of age in a world of steam locomotives, produced a model of mind full of repressed energies and neurotic release valves. But ever since Alan Turing posed the immortal question “Can machines think?” in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” our technology has overflown the safe confines of metaphor. In 1958, John Von Neumann’s posthumous book The Computer and the Brain speculated about the brain as a computing machine…