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.)
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
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.
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.
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. --
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... ;)
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.
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.
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.
I think this is admirable in a newspaper. I'm sick of papers with slanted arguments - this one seems to actually be presenting _BOTH_ sides of the picture!
Go NY Times!
Thus is the story in just about EVERY article on the brain. And that's how the scientists are, too. I work in a large neuroscience department (as a sysadmin, certainly not a researcher... although I wouldn't be surprised if I've been a subject unknowingly... :> ) and there isn't a single pair of doctors or grad students in the place that have the same "theory" about any aspect of how the brain works, is structured, or anything else.
-Chris
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/
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 !
http://www.wired.com/new s/news/technology/story/22223.html