We are narrative creatures, and have no problem constructing approximate mental models. The problem is building useful and correct models which can be used for

We are narrative creatures, and have no problem constructing approximate mental models. The problem is building useful and correct models which can be used for prediction. The great thing about gravity is you can plug on a couple masses to an equation and know exactly what will happen. On the other hand, we have lots of short hand for what the brain is doing (eg, "memory") and lots of just so stories about how those things might work (eg, "like a stick of RAM"), but those stories rarely give a full picture of what's going on it help predict how to improve things - like remember, or cure Alzheimer's. For many complex systems, simple observation is a problem. With a brain, you can't observe things in fine detail without killing the host. So we can't see how local phenomena interact to create complex emergent behavior - observing the local means suppressing the global. And while we have big global observations from MRIs, and tiny local observations from cutting out individual neurons and applying electricity, there's a huge middle ground in between. Another problem is that global emergent phenomena can change the way the local systems behave... We tend to imagine knowledge progressing from the tiny systems or to the big systems, but we see feedback in the other direction too, for example through hormone release. Which, again, is difficult to observe when isolating tiny parts of a system.