Slashdot Mirror
How Much Give Can the Brain Take?
Your Mama writes "Just how malleable is the brain? How easily can a person overcome the forces -- genetic and environmental -- that shape a creature from birth? Over the last few weeks, evidence has emerged that throws these questions into a new light. The NY Times has the article" (The usual "free NYT registration required" notice would be here if we weren't so bored with it.)
Ok, I've reread the article. They do talk about the new research indicating that new nuerons can form in all parts of the brain. However, this really doesn't seem to be the point of the article. The new research is actually written of for ~20% of the article. The first half of the first section is a long introduction, and the second section is a review of the current thinking on the importance of the "brain-formative" years of early life. The article reminds me of many a high school paper that was stretched to meet a word count requirement.
Intolerant people should be shot.
"Why Michael Couldn't Hit (And Other Tales of the Neurology of Sports)" by Harold L. Klawans, M.D.
The title is a reference to Michael Jordan, who despite being one of the greatest basketball athletes of all time, utterly failed to be a world-class baseball player. The book provides fascinating evidence that to be a world class athlete, there are windows of opportunity for learning particular skills during early childhood. If the window is missed, that person will never be capable of performing at a world class level.
Even if you're not interested in sports, I think the material in the book is applicable to almost any human activity. For example, he talks about violinists, and differences in CAT scans of the brains of people who started before the age of 13, and after 13. Fascinating stuff.
Learn why Babe Ruth was more superhuman than you might think... I love this quote (a footnote): "*None of this applies to Babe Ruth. He used the heaviest bat of any major league slugger, one that was clearly so heavy that its moment of inertia was so great that no one could possibly have used it successfully to hit major league fastballs. The Babe was blissfully ignorant of physics."
I guess that makes sense... Loss of empathy or
the ability to predict the reactions of others
could lead to what they probably mean when they
say that.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
An interesting field I've run across is that of accelerated learning. I've found Dr. Win Wenger's book, The Einstein Factor, an interesting read, covering many of the threads discussed on this news item. For example, in the book Wenger mentions a study of a group of Nuns (not sure where they are, I've lent my copy out to someone) who on live to age 90+. This group of people have had virtually no incidents of debilitating mental deterioration such as Alzheimer's disease. The premise of the book is that intelligence is not what you have, but what you make of it. The nuns don't get Alzheimer's because they use their brains constantly, keeping diaries and staying active well into their later years. Many interesting comments on how geniuses (Einstein & Tesla, among others) looked/thought about the world. Check out Win Wenger's Project Renaisance home page at http://www.winwenger.com/, or read about what Project Renainssance is.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
It's important to remember with information like this that while it has an effect in how we understand the brain, it doesn't change a hundred years of empirical science.
:) I think research like this shows promise, if it can be applied to the idea of increasing the neuronal reproduction, to reverse degenerative mental conditions, or even just age related wear and tear. Let's just not get carried away and say that because of this research, suddenly our old ideas about age and mentality are wrong.
The truth is that as we age, there are marked decreases in our ability to solve problems requiring fluid intelligence, quick responses to new situations, and incorporation of new information into a problem space.
That doesn't mean there isn't plenty of anecdotal evidence of those 90 year old men Heinlein was so fond of, that could knock any 4 20 year olds on their cognitive asses, it just says that by and large, the trend is towards some slippage, especially in the areas of thought requiring flexibility and adaptability.
If these neurons have been here being produced all along, then they obviously aren't sufficient to prevent the mind's downfall - maybe they slow it down, but the mind still falters.
Now let me reverse myself a little...
more important maybe is how little.. intelligence is about filtering and focusing on meaning..
there's also a story about this group of nuns who all live to be like 90+.. their trick is to keep learning.. new stuff, languages etc all the time.. you could probably google "nuns aging longevity learning" or whatever to find out about'em..
it'll be cool to see quantum computers process 1 AND 0, transcend binary distinction and the dominant left brained white boy categorization mania.. either/or arguments are less persuasive (in this case) than and/both..
If one looks at the article - it mentions THOUSANDS of new cells migrating in the monkey brains. If I recall basic pathology correctly, the human brain has on the order of TRILLIONS of cells. No mention is made of whether any functional improvement or difference was noted and the article even mention that no one knows what the new neurons were doing.
Chimps differ from we humans by approx a 1000 genes out of 100,000 or so and their brains are maybe a 1/3 of our size in the higher areas. It is reasonable to infer that if this magnitude of repair or growth occured in humans then not much of an appreciable difference would occur. Much of the (re)learning that occurs in traumatic brain injured patients(people and monkeys) involves new neural CONNECTIONS between cells - not the new growth of cells.
Other physiologic processess are also occuring in the body which may play a role in the hinderence of developing new neurons. A child can fluently learn multiple languages easily, yet an adult will with difficultly learn one or two with an accent. An infants or childs brain is still growing and has not had its developmental proceses shut down by the effects of maturation hormones.
Future research will probably concentrate on whether the adult brain cells are at the end of their lifetime or if they can be induced to be young again and divide and produce new neurons.
..........FULL STOP.
right and wrong are not subjective, rather whatever society agrees upon. these are known as laws. by living in this country you have implicitaly agreed to obey these laws, or to accept punishment for violating them. if you do not like these laws then leave. otherwise do what you will within them
Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on earth.
>> Humans are born with instincts, but anything can be learned whether one has his underlying machinery in order or not.
Oh, really? Try ingesting a fifth of whiskey daily for a few months and let me know how your hacking goes...
- freehand
How is this Nazi-like? I would love it if my great-grandkids could escape my bad eyes, allergies, and Asperger's Syndrome. If they were smarter that would be terrific. Read Heinlein's "Beyond This Horizon".
Would you accuse your dentist of being a Nazi? And no, I don't give a damn what color or gender my descendants are.
..........FULL STOP.
How is it that some *younger* people can't use a computer, while others can easily network their home?
Check out an old book by Glenn Doman "Teach Your Baby to Read". It's about teaching babies to read. The ideal age for learning to read is 24 months according to this guy...
Now the really neet thing is that I'm doing it with my 15 month old son. I print out in big bold caps each new word he learns to say (eg. CRACKER, MAMA, DOGGY, BOOT etc.) and show it to him, say it to him and put it in context a few times a day. In two weeks of doing this, he can easily identify 8 words presented in random order mixed with words he doesn't know. I only spend 10 or 15 minutes a day doing this. And the ease with which he learns new words is increasing.
So where am I going with this (certainly my purpose is not just to brag about my son :)? We are constantly robbing our children of their true potential by underestimating their abilities. The same is probably true for adults if this article is correct. For all you who are parents out there, take 15 or 20 minutes a day to teach your children, and you will be astounded!
Most of us geeks know that humans can learn much more than school presents us with. Its a matter of challenge, interest and love, not ability.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Like most scientific folk wisdom ("You use only 10 percent of your brain power," "Right-brained people are more creative") the Mozart effect, as it is sometimes called, is extrapolated from research whose meaning is open to debate.
There is an interesting Skeptical Inquirer article debunking the 10-percent myth.
1 S4W 4 M0V13 L4$T W33K WH3R3 $C13NT1$T$ F0UND 0UT 4 W4Y 2 R3GE3N3R4T3 BR41N
:wq
C3LLZ. TH31R 3XP3R1M3NT W0RK3D, 4ND TH3Y H4D 4 CUR3 F0R 0LDT1M3RZ D1S3AS3!!1
JU$T TRY 2 1M3G1NE: S0M3 D4Y, R0N4LD R34G4N M1GHT B3 LUC1D!!!!!!!11
TH1$ T3CHN0L0GY M1GHT B3 4V41L4BL3 2 3V3RY0N3 PR3TTY S00N, T00. TH3 0NLY C4TCH
1Z TH4T M0$T 0F TH3 SC13NT1STS G0T 34T3N BY G14NT $H4RK$, S0 1T M1GHT T4K3 4
WH1L3 2 R3C0N$TRUCT TH31R W0RK. BUMM3R. 3NYW4Y, TH3 N4M3 0F TH3 D0CUM3NT4RY
1Z ``D33P BLU3 S34'' S0 D0N"T M1$$ 1T 1F U R 1NT3R3$T3D 1N TH1$ $0RT 0F TH1NG.
l8er d00dz!!!!!!!$%*$%*$!!!!!!!!!!11
:WQ
------ ------ ------
ALL HA1L B1FF, TH3 M05T 31337 D00D!!!!!1
------ ------ ------
ALL HA1L B1FF, TH3 M05T 31337 D00D!!!!!1
:WQ
------ ------ ------
ALL HA1L B1FF, TH3 M05T 31337 D00D!!!!!1
------ ------ -
There is a good (and simple) reason why the dogma became that no neurons were formed in the adult brain. People looked and didn't find any. Of course, all they could say at that point was that it seemed unlikely that more than N neurons were being formed per time T. The simplest hypothesis is that zero are formed. In the absence of other evidence, that wins.
Were some scientists a bit too confident in the hypothesis? Yes, probably. Were they all shocked? Nope. Not everyone dropped the ball...it just reads that way in the popular press. ("Humans Grow No New Neurons!!!!" "Humans Do Grow New Neurons!!!!!")
Also, for what it's worth, 1k neurons/day isn't very many. You have between 10^10 and 10^11 neurons in your brain. (They're hard to count; an order of magnitude is about as honest as we can realistically get.) 10^10/10^3 = 10^7 days or about 30,000 years to replace all your brain's neurons. Unfortunately, you tend to die after about 80. Okay, but this at least shows that neural regeneration is *possible*, so we could maybe find a way to increase the rate...we couldn't have done that if adults didn't make any neurons, right? Actually we could have: humans make neurons when they are younger; we'd just have had to do a bit more tweaking of developmental regulation pathways to go from "zero" to "enough" instead of "a few" to "enough".
The bottom line is that it's cool for neurobiologists, but you still have to take care of the neurons you've got (and hopefully make them connect in computationally useful ways); yeah, you'll get a few more, but not enough to save you from stupidity.
right and wrong are not subjective, rather whatever society agrees upon. these are known as laws.
Oh, it's that simple. Silly me. But, I happen to dislike some of the laws in my country, I my point of view they wrong, yet I obey them.
Apparently, what you call right and wrong, seems to be what I call legal and illegal.
Sorry, a typo. Here is what I meant to say:
right and wrong are not subjective, rather whatever society agrees upon. these are known as laws.
Oh, it's that simple. Silly me. But, I happen to dislike some of the laws in my country, In my point of view they are wrong, yet I obey them.
Apparently, what you call right and wrong, seems to be what I call legal and illegal.
thanks for the correction..."o" and "p" are a litte closer together than the limit of my optical resolution at the moment.
Somebody did a recent follow-up. It was a comparative study of the behavior of two sets of twins raised in 'similar' (whatever that means) social environments; one member of each pair had suffered damage very similar to that which our friend Phineas experienced (they preserved his skull; later, A team of Hrvard Surgeons reconstructed the probable damage--seen in a SciAM article-in order to identify the brain structures responsible for constructing and preserving our moral attitudes. Said skull still sits on diplay at harvard, above the entrance to their neurobio museum. Creepy.).
The conclusion reached by the study was that the role of the brain ares in quesiotn in regulating moral behavior was unquestionable. The mechanism is still completetly unknown and knowledge of the structures involved remains imprecise (the specific structures damaged in each of the recent cases were understandibly different, with some srtucutres destroyed in both cases, and others in one or the other, but not both)
Of course, both the twins and Gage likely lost a bit more of themselves then the ability to determine and/or care about right from wrong, so we arent likel yot be able to isolate only those structures responsible for the creation of moral behavior for quite some time, if ever, but it seems interesting to me regardless.
Maybe someone else more cpable of coherent thought and writing (read:anyone who sees fewer than three keyboards in front of them) who has read the articles could respond?
please?
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
computer? I don't think it is related to how smart you are, but maybe it is a function of how many
brain cells are being created or how their bodies manage to incorporate them into their existing
brain.
The geezers I've met that are bright, have always been smart people. Not in the way that you're born smart, but in the way that they've never stopped learning. They read decent books, not absorb gamma rays all day. They have always had an interest in technology, not suprised by these computer gizmos CNN keeps talking about. They developed critical thinking skills and use them, not your typical confused the-way-things-were geezer.
I've read a little research on alzheimers about the same thing, if you aren't using it, you're losing it.
1)Rate of neuronal death: increases with time
Rate of Neurogenesis: Decreases with time, initally very small when compared to (1)
as soon as you lose the neural structure that encodes the memories you have recorded-howver THAT works (*probably* strength of synaptic connections), you lose the memories
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
NPR Science Friday had a "Brain Update" show which examines various issues in detail, with Charles Gross on the program (the one who conducted the monkey expt.) Worth listening to, since so many are complaining about lack of info. Here's the link
a te=10/22/1999&PrgID=5
http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/cmnpd01fm.cfm?PrgD
Needs Real Audio, btw.
Wooly Mammoth.
-- I'm not a freak show, I'm a mammal. --
Given that people thought for a long time that the adult brain was pretty much unmalleable, going from there and saying that people now aren't so sure seems to be pretty informative and interesting.
The article mentions some people who have
"lost the ability to tell right from wrong"
through neurological damange. As right and
wrong are subjective classifications, I wonder
what exactly they mean by that
Perhaps a more objective way of stating this would be that these people are unable to grasp societal norms, or even if they did, do not see the need to comply with them.
Yes, it seems that as we get older, we lose our sense of play and curiosity. While I think simple aging does play a very important role, I think a large part of this due is societal pressure: as we become adults, we're more and more made to conform, to act 'responsibly', to behave in a certain manner. Adults are not supposed stop and pick up a strange looking object on the street just because it looks fascinating. There's a label for people who continue to do so: geek or nerd ... Totally 'uncool'. Hormones kick in: finding and impressing a mate is more important than learning something new. Learning takes the back seat to the pressures of everyday life.
--
But... there are a lot of things that are universal- across all cultures. No society would think it's a good thing to kill your folks. That society would disappear after just a few generations. Many cross-cultural moral values are reflected in language, for example; every language has a word for "murder" - as defined as wrongful killing. Murder could be considered universally bad. Now, a death could be taken as murder by one culture, and justifyable killing by another, so the standards for murder don't hold, but the idea of murder does.
Subjectivism irks me. It makes me want to shake the subjectivist vigorously and yell "Grow up!" Thank God my compatriots and I define this as acceptable... ;)
There's a longer and very interesting article on Dr Damasio's research in this week's edition of the Economist.
But unfortunately it's not one of the ones they're giving away free on the website, so here are a few paragraphs cut down from the full article. If any of the Economist science writers are out there (I know you sometimes read Slashdot), thanks for a fascinating piece!
"The two patients, now in their early 20s, had survived similar injuries to their pre-frontal cortexes during infancy... Both had lived lonely maladjusted lives with no plans for the future and unfortunate personal habits such as compulsive lying, petty theft, poor hygiene, irregular sex lives, and indifference to their resulting children
"In the set of tests psychologists have dreamt up to quantify moral health, their performance clearly bespoke an ignorance of the conceptual foundations of morality... The patients' responses to these tests were about the same as those that would have been expected from a ten-year-old child: that is, they appeared to be motivated exclusively by a desire to avoid personal punishment [ignoring any wider moral implications]. This degree of pathology is significantly more serious than those found in those who suffer brain damage as adults.
Also, the two "seemed never to have learnt any of the basic moral rules that cover social interaction, apparently because their early traumas prevented them from ever acquiring this sort of information... to all appearances, they suffer from little or no sense of remorse at their behaviour.
"Neurobiologists have long known that the brain can compensate for some sorts of injury that are sustained during the course of its development. It does this by recruiting new sets of nerve cells to substitute for those that have been damaged or destroyed. The pre-frontal cortex, however, seems to be unable to repair itself adequately in this way, leaving infant victims with no means of learning right from wrong during the relevant period of their growth.
"The solution, Dr Damasio postulates, may lie in helping that part of the brain to annex more nerve cells, by carefully adjusting levels of the relevant neurotransmitters..."
Thus, even if Dr Gould and Dr Gross are right that there are always new neurons migrating to the pre-frontal cortex, it seems they can't always be integrated.
Paraphrasing (the doctor's stick) "Of course, the flaws in a stupid person's brain are genetically determined - but we, the doctors, will ultimately be able to fix that with genetic engineering."
OK. So where is that heartless reptile, swooping around in a white coat, passing himself off as a physician, who can fix the genetic flaws in my son's brains. Gee, that way, I'll be so thankful to him (or her).
Dr. Joseph Mengele lives. The New York Times has apparently untertaken the task of reporting for him.
Although it's possible that a simple tweak will completely prevent the slow slide into senility, I doubt it. The brain is a complex beast, and there are just too damn many things that can go wrong with it. Granted, I've met people lucky enough to remain very sharp late in their lives, and the wisdom that comes from experience often more than makes up for reduced mental agility, but the fact remains that the brain does suffer from old age.
The body is like a lot like a microsoft os: when you first start it up, it's in a fairly simple, clean, state, but the longer it runs, the more random cruft and unanticipated mutations it accumulates, until it becomes incredibly unstable and finally crashes. After all, both are a collection of hacks generated by the same design process: tweak the code and ship if, say, the mean time between failures is twice the expected period of operation. for windows, the expected period of operation is 8 hours (by then, the average user has shut it down for the night), so it should run, on average, for 16 hours before crashing. for the human body, it's about 25-35 years (by then, like any good hunter-gatherer, you've had your kids, raised them to maturity and been eaten by a saber-toothed tiger), so MTBF should be 50-70 years. with medical technology, that's been pushed back a bit, but we're operating way out of spec, and our bodies come with no warrantee, express or implied, regarding fitness of use for any purpose, including, but not limited to, survival, reproduction, or the ability to operate a computer in the wee ours of the morning while retaining sufficient mental capacity to post a reply to /. that doesn't degenerate into a rambling jumble of twisted metaphors, all different.
any resemblance between the above post and the writings of a sane person are purely coincidental.
But... there are a lot of things that are universal- across all cultures. No society would think it's a good thing to kill your folks. That society would disappear after just a few generations.
Ever heard of mercy killing?
IMHO universal right and wrong is just an illusion we get from the abstract concepts the use of language impose on us. Ofcourse "Murder" is wrong, in the abstract sense, but as soon as you deal with an actual experienced situation, the choice of whether it is right or wrong will depend on the actual situation, and previous experiences of the subject deciding between right and wrong.
Thanks!
IMHO this one is much more well written than the NYT one. I'll check out the mentioned article in Science (Oct 15 issue) tomorrow...
Age has nothing to do with new tricks. Old dogs _can_be taught new tricks, and old people _can_ learn new things.
;)
It's a stupid cliche really. The real deal is "You can't teach an old dog STUPID tricks."
I agree completely. But as you grow older you'll tend to find more things stupid, because you know better--or at least think you do
The way I see the human mind, and the way I've often observed my own mind to be, is like that of a very large, very complex computer program.
You are in good company, some AI folks have believed so for decades. IMHO the computer analogy is a much too simplified model for our minds. It leads to all sorts of weird conclusions, such as the idea that there might be a sequence of words (a program in your analogy) that would cause the mind to hang. Also the mind performs many things in parallel, for instance all sensory input (vision, audio etc) is preprocessed in massive parallelism before it reaches conscious experience.
cypherpunks/cypherpunks used to work, and the NYT has decided their ability to control hacker readers is more important than their demographics of people actually reading their e-rag. So they appear to be reading Slashdot, and _killing_ accounts mentioned here. :P
I read the article, and I didn't sign up for anything. All you have to do is figure out password variations quicker than they can make them invalid. I hit one that has not been made invalid. I'm not going to repeat it here. It can just stay valid, thank you- representing the shared, passed-around newspaper of some clever hacker who could hit on a combination that another hacker could guess, but which would not be tracked and invalidated by whatever lunatic at the Times is responsible for at all costs making sure people _don't_ read the Times without logging in.
Here's a question. If RMS reads the times, with his traditional login/PW of rms/rms, do they refuse to allow him the password he uses for himself, just because he lets other people know it? For a basically trivial information site which one would think they'd _want_ readership for?
Back in the 50s everyone thought nurture was the case, then in the late 70s things switched to nature, and now we are back to the correct answer: nurture.
;)
The world is not binary, at least not the one outside my window
The debate is not about if it is nature OR nurture. It's about to which degree they both matter.
I just love the MS analogy ;)
;)
However I think you could take it a bit further. If the mind already has a model that explains a phenomenon sufficiently well, there is a resistance to learn a new model that might be better, instead you just make small modifications on your old one.
Just like the MS Word app BTW
Nice comment, should have higher score IMHO...
So reluctance to learning might be a cultural trait? Probably, but I think this is a secondary effect that merely reinforces the trend. The main cause I believe is that (as you mentioned) the need to learn decreases, and the need to learn decreases because we know a lot of useful stuff already...
What's even more interesting is asking someone to say the alphabet backwards as fast as they can forwards :)
----------
Because one chose the path of learning how to do such things? I may have led a particularly technology minded life -- but that doesn't mean that someone who focussed their energies on something completely different doesn't have the aptitude or ability to do such things.
I struggle daily with the 100,000 things I could or should be learning. You could say I like to learn. However, I then realize that if my situation were different then I wouldn't worry so much about such things because I wouldn't be driven by the need to succeed and I probably wouldn't care to learn anything at all besides what i consider "fun".
You can psycho-analyze a young and older person and you will find that both are particularly opinionated. I know I am. The fact still remains, though, that younger people are still exploring their possibilities so they may seem more open to learning. However, as I'm sure some people would agree, once you get locked into a particular profession, you tend to not really care about anything else except that which will improve your job. There are just too many things to focus on in your own area of expertise to give a s*** about "new-fangled" technology. I know if I was 60, I would rather be manipulating my retirement plan to accomodate my need to travel while brushing up on my golf stroke.
Yes, knowledge is sometimes motivating and even fun -- but most people don't care about such things that don't directly affect them (you can argue that techno geeks go out of their way to learn such things, but I'd just say that it's in their area of expertise). Do most people care -- as given in an example further up -- how Asynchronous Transfer Mode protocol works and how it's used on every non-legacy telephone network now? Nope.
----------
Yeah really. I usually just go to one story and find somewhat interesting comments to add points to -- as well as moderating down flame comments that have no point at all.
:). The story would have to be incredibly interesting to spend 3 hours reading comments :).
Nevermind reading the second or third pages of comments at all
----------
I never called him a man of character, and I don't like him at all. I'm just telling you to fucking look at your self you self righteous yankie prick.
It is so fucking stupid every time some marginal group of ultra conservatives wins a bunch of protest votes somewhere in europe, conserned voices echo from accross the atlantic. Conserned but utterly uninformed, apparently, if you liken Haider's freak election success to the second coming of Hitler.
In your country speeches filled with 'our great nation', 'god and fatherland' and 'we are the best people in the world' are the norm. You protect the rights of the KKK to spout facist propaganda, socialism and liberalism are dirty words, and your idea of democracy is a choice between two almost identical parties (both ultra conservative to european standards), and who ever has the money to sling more mud than anyone else, wins.
It's funny you refer to me as, ahem, a "yankie prick", given
that I am a fairly recent immigrant from Europe.
I wouldn't call Haider's election marginal or freak, he has
held high posts before, and came back after being forced out,
so this shows clear support for his views. Indeed my understanding
is that some other prominent Austrian politicians have had a
direct relationship with Hitler's SS and Hitleryugend. So specifically in
the case of Austria, Haider seems to be the rule not the exception.
Except for strange criticism of freedom of speech (for KKK or whoever),
I concur with your opinion of America. You seem to be just like our
politicians here - slinging mud at others hoping it'll make yourself
look better.
But remember, my point was that Buchannan is similar to Haider, whom
you just called a "marginal ultra conservative" - a very fitting description
of Buchannan as well. And republicans vary widely, from very conservative
to very liberal. Most even desire to save social security - the ultimate
big government program around these places.
Oh, and that quote "man of character" was how Haider referred to
SS veterans.
You seem to be just like our politicians here - slinging mud at others hoping it'll make yourself look better.
Yeah! It is fun and effective. SPLAT! I don't know what came over me, I don't usually flame. I stick by my words, though, but without the 'fucking' etc.
It seems to me that this Times article is saying "Noone knows for sure, but some people think this, and others think the opposite." Write an article when someone can actually influence the arguement one way or the other.
Intolerant people should be shot.
Quite interesting reading.
So now we know that the brain improves itself.
So with the proper technology applied, in some distant future, it should be possible to increase intelligence (a function of neural connections) without limit.
HEADLINE: The entire human race turns geek.
Evolution anybody?
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
And if new cells are perpetually being created and the incorporation of these new cells in our brain allows us to change our thinking, then there is no reason why we can't accept new ideas.
So does this mean that it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks? While people are obviously going to be different, I think it is a fair statement to say that older people tend to be more fixed in their opinions and less willing to change them. If new cells are being created all the time and this enables our brains to be malleable, then is simply stubboness or our attitudes that prevent us from being open to other people's ideas or new technologies?
How is it that some older people can't comprehend an ATM, while others can easily use a computer? I don't think it is related to how smart you are, but maybe it is a function of how many brain cells are being created or how their bodies manage to incorporate them into their existing brain.
I think the research they are carrying out has some very interesting ramifications and opens up a lot of questions about ourselves and our learning ability over time.
The article mentions some people who have
"lost the ability to tell right from wrong"
through neurological damange. As right and
wrong are subjective classifications, I wonder
what exactly they mean by that. Could they mean
losing the abililty to empathize with others?
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
It seems like every week I read about debate on enhancing this, fixing that. Someone needs to get the balls, lawyers, and volunteers to actually test on a human.
People with brains 'cooked' by age 3 usually become Buchannan supporters.
place where the very idea of a brain transplant is absurd.
Absurd? Maybe in the way you can get a new brain, but not a new body. Once we make tools small and smart enough to re-connect even the tinniest nerves you'll be trading that old meat for the newest model. "Honey, Look! This one comes with a 10-year snore free guarantee!"
cypherphunk/cypherphunk
---
END OF LINE
Pass: malda
--
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We (our brains) are shaped in two ways:
No, your mind is shaped by Nature and Nurture. Your brain is physically created by physical processes (is that a duh?). These processes have nothing to do with the time Billy beat you up and took your lunch money. They have everything to do with how cells are instructed in the creation of other cells. These instructions are in the DNA
Daniel
now a utilty like purge -f /dev/brain for all that useless info we learned in school.. would be useful .. yah?
I'm the proud owner of a brainmachine and did some research on the human brain and the way it works. To make this long...... story short every second we store images sounds feelings and knowledge at the same time and we can keep doing this for approx a million years (no shit), in other words you can learn AN alphabet see it think about it (feelings) and hear it every second for a million years. If you can remember the first one after that time I wouldn't be able to know but I do know that practice is some sort of defrag meaning that the alphabet you use most is accessed easier then the others.
I SO HATE AGEISM:
6.3 You must be 18 years or older to subscribe to the Service
Before you start pointing your finger at Europe again, it may be interesting to note that if Joerg Haider were an american politician instead of a scary austrian one, the same views would make him a moderate republican.
A literal translation of a perfectly ordinary election campain speech of a republican, or even your liberalish president reminds europeans of the crap extreme right wing nationalists spout. Perhaps with the exception of the French, who might be used to Gaullist politicians talking the same crap.
I remember reading a study awhile back which showed that people who are in occupations where they exercise their mind heavily tend not to lose brain mass.
Then again, cause and effect could be reversed... perhaps people genetically wired to have a brain that remains more in shape, are more likely to choose a job that requires them to keep learning. While others decide somewhere between age 15 and 20 that they've learned enough, and it's time to get a job and a life, a certain portion of the population never grows up, and set out to know and understand everything, and read slashdot.
On a side note, if it is true, that we do continually form new neurons, then why do older people seem to learn much slower and often forget things? Is it even possible to really ever forget something?
New information can replace old by means of synaptic changes--happens all the time in ANNs, where no new nodes are added once training has started. I doubt that every time you learn something, you get a new neuron.
And the case that old people seem to learn much slower: It takes less time to learn a completely new concept for a fresh mind, than to try to incorporate a new concept into an existing body of knowledge.
Something I've noticed;
When people have a lot of self-esteem they really don't have much trouble learning because their learning process is just that learning; they know what to ask, they know where to look.
If they don't have that self-esteem, they have to artificially build their confidence by over practicing their field of study past the point of ridiculousness.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Dude, I agree with you 100% and it's refreshing to see you critique your post so honestly. It's a case of a moderator wanting to use up all his points. Sometimes it's better to just eat the points fellas.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
Here's a theory for you.
The way I see the human mind, and the way I've often observed my own mind to be, is like that of a very large, very complex computer program.
Now, this view of the mind illustrates a lot of things. Pertaining to this article, for instance, it would explain why it would appear that the mind is less maluable during the latter stages of life than at the very beginning. Like any program, maintenance is a large factor. You can have a perfectly functional program, but all the code can be globbed up (spagetti like) and quite difficult to add to. Or if you had taken the time to comment your code a bit better, perhaps use a more open programming style more apt to change, you may be able to add to or even alter some of the basic routines that everything else depends upon.
On a side note, this also shows us something about memory. Often we cannot remember the things that happend when we were very young (as in still developing) very clearly. Perhaps this is because the general structures we have stored that information in are not quite upwards compatable any longer, and thus some of it is lost. Or, as some hypnosis experts will tell you, not lost, but only not retrieveable.
As I said, just a thought.
--Brock
(And remember to liberaly comment your code! You never know who might be continuing your work!)
"Does this imply that more and more old people will be mentally fit? Given the problem of the dramatically increasing average age in most industry nations, we should probably hope for this effect."
Yes. If the demand holds up, good old evolution will take its course and supply the solution in several generations down the road.
His main objection to the 10% myth seems to be that it's used by people whose ideas he disagrees with. The evidience to support his own claim that we use 100% of our brains boils down to two points
> 1. Pet scans show that...over the course of a whole day,
> just about all of the brain is used at one time or another.
If I have 200Meg of ram in my machine and I use pretty much all of it over the course of a day, but never more than 20% at a time, does that prove it is all necessary ?
> 2. The myth presupposes an extreme localization of functions
> in the brain. If the "used" or "necessary" parts of the brain were scattered all around the organ, that would imply that much of the brain is in fact necessary.
No, it doesn't. You might as well claim that since apples are scattered around the apple tree, the whole tree is edible.
I am aware that neither of my objectictions demonstrates that we don't use/need all our brain. I am just irritated by sloppy thinking and flawed arguments from such an intellectually self-righteous writer.
Personally I suspect that most people use most of their brains. Nature is efficient: brains require a lot of energy to keep going so we would be unlikely to evolve larger brains than we need.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
The recent experiment on rats regenerating "supposedly permanently dormant" neurons thru intracranial Nerve Growth Factor, led me to research alternative NGF stimulants. Acetyl-l-carnitine does just this, with significant effects in human patients, and (shhh, quiet) it can be bought on health food store shelves. Time to reawaken brain cells!
tcboo
Grow some of those brain cells back and learn to type like a somewhat intelligent human.
Before we ask the question:
"How much can the Brain takes?"
We must first have the answer to this question:
"How much is _much_?"
That is, in other word - how do we QUANTIFY our question?
Information (facts/data/stories/experience/perception/etc) are that we have in real-life cannot be quantify as neatly as the data we have in the digital world - in bits and bytes.
Therefore, it is almost impossible to quantify how much can our Brains hold because how do we quantify an "image" that is in our brain - especially those "images" that comes not only "image" per se, but also "feelings", including the "feel" of "smell" and the "background noise" that may be associated with that "image".
Until we can find a way to quantify our question, the question of "How Much Our Brains Can Hold", IMHO, is a no-brainer.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
--
Woo, free sub-par articles for everyone!
I've always believed that older people probably have just as much capability to learn new stuff as the younger folks, but they just have less motivation to do so. I mean, when you're young and just starting out, you -need- to learn as much as possible to stay alive, secure a good paying job, catch a good mate, start a family, etc.. But once you've married, have a mess a kids who can more or less take care of themselves, and have enough beans saved up to live comfortably without working anymore, why bother putting the effort into learning new stuff? Learning hard stuff takes a lot of effort, effort which a young person might be willing to expend, but not necessarily someone who already has all the essentials in life achieved.
There are, of course, some people who love the challege and continue learning all their lives, even after fulfilling life essentials.
The mentioned research could help finding explanations for these phenomena and improve our knowledge of how to counter the weakening of mental facilities. Mental exercise is probably always good.
Chilli
-=- Just a random lambda hacker
Age has nothing to do with new tricks. Old dogs
_can_be taught new tricks, and old people _can_
learn new things.
It's a stupid cliche really. The real deal is
"You can't teach an old dog STUPID tricks."
Dogs and people get old in part by not being
stupid or doing stupid tricks.
ciao mtngrown
A semiold guy who will not learn stupid tricks.
Does this imply that more and more old people will be mentally fit? Given the problem of the dramatically increasing average age in most industry nations, we should probably hope for this effect.
Chilli
PS: Maybe most smart old people will in the end be computer geeks, because they were forced to keep learning ;-)
-=- Just a random lambda hacker
http://www.wired.com/new s/news/technology/story/22223.html
Back in the 50s everyone thought nurture was the case, then in the late 70s things switched to nature, and now we are back to the correct answer: nurture.
People forget the genes are like a road map, it's still easy to get lost. If genes were absolute then the phenom of XY females and XX males could not exist.
Right handedness and extroversion are the norm for are species. It is now known that many of the same factors invitro cause introversion and left handedness. Smoking is associated with low birth rate, alcohol with retardation, and the list goes on. Anyone who tries to argue for nature by using twin studies overlooks nine months of co-existent development when the fetus CAN hear there mother voice and is exposed to many important factors. It may be a long time before enough of the population realizes how important biology is in the realm of pyschology, or human development.
If you want something done right, get an expert to do it!
It's not really nature VSnurture, rather, both of them play a part in everything. IE, our ABILITY to learn, or to grow new neurons as might be the case here, is part of our heritage and thus affects the ability to form new connections.
Actually, your brain IS shaped by both Nature and Nurture. There simply isn't enough information in the DNA to form all of the complexity in the brain -- environmental factors have important influences on the normal development of the brain.
The article mentions the 'folk-wisdom' that one "cannot teach an old dog new tricks". Until about 1995 (wild guess) I'd always read the neurologists/neuroscientists believed this to be true in the sense of no new neurons being formed after X years. Now we know that new neurons can form in adult brains.
This is not as simple a change in knowledge as, for example, recognizing an Rh factor in the blood. To say one year there are 4 blood types and the next year say there are eight is not a contradiction (unless you say _only_ 4). But it is a contradiction to say one year that new neurons don't form, and the next year new neurons do form.
So what does this matter? People make mistakes, right? Well sure, but any neurologist who mouthed off saying 'no new neu' really should have said 'I have no clue', 'I don't know', or any myriad of truthful statements; if you're going to be a scientist, you mustn't just make $#!+ up!
And another rant! Even if we could grow neurons, that wouldn't preclude learning in later years. Barring X-Files pedagogy, there isn't anyone who knows for certain how the brain and the mind come together. Last I'd heard, neurons were no longer the brain's wires (probably a bad metaphor anyway), but the microtubules within the neurons were. And the (programmer's) neural net idea seems to be out too, since there are non-neuronal broadcasts also; chemical for sure, and electrical as well, IIRC.
So I'll through out three hypotheses for fun and chunk in an aphorism.
Fun Hypothesis #1: The heart is the seat of the soul/mind/whatchamacallit. Why? Electrical isolation. It sets its own rhythm.
Fun Hypothesis #2: The stomach is the seat of the soul/mind/whatchamacallit. Why? Just a gut feeling.
Fun Hypothesis #3: The entire body is the seat of the soul/mind/whosamadosit. Huh? Ever seen them seperated? Phantom limbs/pain. All cells have microtubules. Easy check: start correlating physiological and psychological dysfunction; such as (say) systemic failure (a la lupus) with dissociative personality disorder. If there is a correlation then see which came first. If there is such an order, see if the connection is causal. (Of course, I'll bet the disease is just so bad that dissociation is a coping action. But even that idea supports a much stronger tie between the whole body and the mind.)
Aphorism: The second most important statement in science is: "I don't know." The first should follow the second.
Okay, I've had enough of the moderation system. Here I go posting something where I'm mostly talking out of my ass (and I even say it in the post), and it gets a +1 "informative".
This is bullshit. Find better things to click on, folks.
-Chris
I remember reading a study awhile back which showed that people who are in occupations where they exercise their mind heavily tend not to lose brain mass. In contrast, people who have relatively mindless jobs (such as bus drivers) tend to actually lose brain mass.
I think this phenomenon is related your question about learning: If you rarely exercise your ability to learn, then your body doesn't bother to maintain that part of the brain, and it literally atrophies. It doesn't matter how much you already know -- if you're not equipped to learn, you can't learn (at least, not easily).
Neurogenesis implies that you might be able to restore some lost functions, depending on where those new neurons are placed. I wouldn't bank alot of money on it.
A different issue that affects people's ability to learn certain topics is fear and/or strong misconceptions: some people are just too afraid (either consciously or subconsciously) of a particular topic to learn anything on it, or too certain that a topic is too difficult to be learned. Basically, both states lock out the person's ability to accept that they can and should learn about the topic at hand. I see both happen computer newbies all the time.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
useless comment, but i, for one, really hope neuron regeneration does exist. otherwise i might end up paying for all those years of excessive drug use in my youth ... oh my ... :)
- j
---
"The only guys who might buy [the Apple iBook] are the kind who wear those ludicrous baggy pants with the built-in rope that's used for a belt." - John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine
What is this guy talking about?
... with ease" has nothing to do with "underlying machinery" having to be in order (whatever that means). Humans are born with instincts, but anything can be learned whether one has is underlying machinery in order or not.
No matter how malleable the brain turns out to be, it is still governed by its genetic heritage. For new connections to form with ease, the underlying machinery must be in order. And the design of these biochemical cogs is encoded in the genes.
We (our brains) are shaped in two ways: by nature (heritage) and by nurture (our environment). Forming "new connections
On a side note, if it is true, that we do continually form new neurons, then why do older people seem to learn much slower and often forget things? Is it even possible to really ever forget something?
~Steve
--
"<r-xr-xr-x> Just try to edit me" -- www.ircnews.com
Its whole philosophy, which makes sense to me is if you debilitate a person by putting them in a non-demanding enviornment, one that does not offer challenge or creativity, the brain shrinks (basically), however, if you put a person in an enviornment that is rich in material and challenge the person, no matter what age, will begin to grow new neurons and build cells to keep pace.
To me these are duh's (you don't use it you lose it). However, I gave this book to my grandfather and told him to cheer up, that he was going to be getting better soon, he just needed to keep challenging himself and he'd be fine. By all means don't shut off. And now, while some parts of the stroke are irreversable (dammed idiot doctors), he is as lively as he was. If we can only get the docs to let him have some vino!(twice dammed)
-Malachi
"Life is all about strategy, mathematics and psychological perceptiveness."