is Eminem a closet neuroscientist?

"I can't tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like"
- Marshall Mathers

This quote, from a rap duet by Rihanna and Eminem explains, in a nutshell, the key challenge in cognitive neuroscience: missing information.

You see, your brain is constantly trying to build up a good representation of your surroundings, which in turn allows you to make "sensible" behavioral decisions. However, the information that you can gather from the outside world is insufficient to know for sure the state of your environment ("what it really is", so to speak).

Now, your brain is pretty good at making educated guesses (inference) about the environment, but, at the end of the day, those guesses ("what it feels like") are all that you have available to guide your behavior.

As an example, consider the problem of vision. You have two eyes (probably), each of which collects light on a 2-D array of photoreceptors that are each sensitive to one of 3 colors.

But the world you are trying to understand has objects spread out in three dimensions, and with a near-infinite number of colors. So, clearly there is some information you are missing.

Your brain's ability to fill in the pieces, and make good guesses is absolutely remarkable. However, the fact that it's constantly making these insane leaps of inference also makes your brain very susceptible to being tricked. 

This leaves us with an interesting dichotomy: the same computational inference ability that makes the brain such a powerful tool is also the one of its main sources of weakness.