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The Future of the Most Important Human Brain
mattnyc99 writes "About a year ago, we watched live as neuroanatomist Jacopo Annese sliced the brain of Memento-style patient Henry Molaison (aka H.M.) into 2,401 pieces. Since even before then, writer Luke Dittrich — whose grandfather happened to be the surgeon to accidentally slice open the H.M. skull in the first place — has been tracking Annese and a new revolution in brain science. From the article in Esquire: 'If Korbinian Brodmann created the mind's Rand McNally, Jacopo Annese is creating its Google Maps. ... With his Brain Observatory, Annese is setting out to create not the world's largest but the world's most useful collection of brains. ... For the first time, we'll be able to meaningfully and easily compare large numbers of brains, perhaps finally understanding why one brain might be less empathetic or better at calculus or likelier to develop Alzheimer's than another. The Brain Observatory promises to revolutionize our understanding of how these three-pound hunks of tissue inside our skulls do what they do, which means, of course, that it promises to revolutionize our understanding of ourselves.'"
While I have no wish to demean their efforts, this approach still seems somewhat brutal to me. I'm no neurologist, but isn't this still a rather macro-level view of things, with the cutting process still causing damage to the fine structures they want to study?
It seems likely to me that future scientists will look back at this in not too long with stifled laugher and perhaps a little shock at the approach.
Clearly this a front organization--for zombies!
No, someone's intelligence or outlook on the world is a combination of upbringing, willpower and education. Anyone could be as intelligent and knowledgeable as they wanted to be, if they wanted to be.
How young are you?
This is one of the most naive things I have ever heard. Some folks are never going to be rocket surgeons.That might not be ok with the current everyone is a genius and everyone gets a trophy crowd but it is the truth.
This is so unbelievably unintelligent that if it weren't so long I might think it was a joke.
I often resort to extreme examples when explaining the ability for variations to people who deny variations exist. So with that in mind, an extreme example of a different kind of brain would be the autistic mind. Clearly it is different. It has little to nothing to do with the way the person was raised or educated over time. It is how their brain was created. If a brain can be created to that extreme of difference why not changed in more subtle ways that allow enhanced mathematical capabilities or greater empathy.
Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't happen or exist.
The whole point of science and these studies is to figure these things out. To learn about the things we can't see but effect our daily lives.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Sorry to disagree with you, but clearly the physical properties of the brain matter.
Which physical properties? Well, we need to find out.
Think about it for a while. All my life I would have given a leg and an arm to learn to play any musical instrument (went to schools for years) and could never get beyond the really easy stuff; a seven year-old child could out-play me every time. But I have a gift for analisys and abstraction, thus I'm good at writing software.
You say upbringing, education and will-power. Well I had all three: mom was a music director who wrote music and poetry, I went to very good music schools and I yearned to be able to play music; I simply don't have the right "hardware".
Try running Deep Blue's software in your bog standard PC, see how far it gets.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
Affect
I was going to mod you troll, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you really do believe that all brains are created equal- but in that case, and by your own argument, you must not be very motivated or lack the discipline to learn the truth of the matter. I wonder what could account for that?
This illness for which H.M. is studied is one with gross pathology that should be very visible with the method used. The study of Einstein's brain did the most important thing that a scientific experiment can do: it falsified a hypothesis. Nobody really knew that Einstein did not have gross pathology until they looked. This is not to say that the person who kept Einstein's brain in a jar on his desk for his whole life had any right to do that, but preserving the brain for the imaging tools of a later generation was a good idea.
Bruce Perens.
The same applies to the dissection of other organs as well. For instance, any dissection of the heart is inherently biased towards the cutting planes defined by the dissector (source). The true arrangement of muscle fibers in the left ventricle of the heart (more precisely the existence of sheet structure) is still a subject of hot debate because of this. Obviously, one might think that by now, we should be able to just pick an organ and throw it into the best relevant imaging scanner (CT, MRI, PET, etc.). The truth is, there is still anatomical information that even state-of-the-art medical imaging modalities cannot reliably reveal.
As an example, consider DT-MRI that measures the diffusion of water molecules along the tissue fibers in an organ. The discretization in the data is such that only the local average orientation of the diffusion of water is known at any given location. To obtain more useful anatomical information, the full fiber pathway in a region needs to be reconstructed, a task called fiber tractography. Different computational methods based on different anatomical assumptions lead to results that are often contradictory (as is the case in the heart models described in the article cited above) and since there is no ground truth (remember that the dissection is biased), we currently hit a dead-end.
Hopefully, as more dissections (like this one) are performed and the data is made available publicly, we will eventually be able to faithfully reconcile pieces of what we observe in medical conditions, in medical scanners, and on the dissection table.
Anyone with that aspiration can teach themselves what they need to, go to school or get training, and do it. Especially for that type of discipline(physics/math) where prerequisite knowledge is more important than original thinking.
You're not serious, are you?
You mean I can train myself to have perfect pitch, like some musicians? Or to have perfect color sense, like artists? Or a deep understanding of multiple dimensions?
That's like saying that we can all play basketball like Wilt Chamberlain, or ride a bike like Lance Armstrong.
Each brain is drastically different, each is capable of different things. No amount of training will make my daughter an engineer like her brother in spite of her nearly perfect math skills. No amount of training will give my son the empathy to deal with animals like his sister has.
Brains are as different as our bodies, and no amount of training will let me run a marathon; my body won't allow it. For some, no amount of training will let them keep up with me on a bicycle.
No amount of training will let most people keep up with me in my field of intellectual expertise; I have great vision in that one area, and I'm a total doofus in others.
Yeah, I can learn to flip burgers. But that won't let me compete with an accomplished chef, who has talent and vision.
I can't escape a feeling that what they are doing is akin to slicing apples and then taking high grain black and white photos of those slices - in order to find out how they taste.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The Funny English Language
No wonder the English language is so very difficult to learn.
I sometimes wonder how we manage to communicate at all!
We'll begin with a box and the plural is boxes.
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
The one fowl is a goose but two are called geese
, Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may found a lone mouse or a whole set of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of a foot and you show me your feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth, Why should not the plural of booth be called beeth?
Then one may be that and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural wouldn't be hose.
And the plural of cat is cats and not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say Mother, we never say Methren,
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis and shim, So English, I fancy you will all agree,
Is the funniest language you ever did see.
Why can’t people from all over the world speak English?
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey