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Intellectual Pursuits May Create Brain Synapses
Bacteriophage writes "There's an interesting news scoop at Science Daily in which some neuroscientists have linked professions to 'brain power.' This may seem to some of you as obvious, the question is if people in 'intellectually stimulating' professions are smart the way they are because of 'nature or nurture,' whether or not they are predestined to take the careers they do, or possibly new synapses are being formed due to on-the-job stimulation."
Just about everyone here has been making the same mistake - they've been equating ability in one area (generally abstract thinking - I mean hey, we're all programmers/thinkers/etc here at /.) with `intelligence'. This isn't just narrow minded - it's plain wrong.
If things were that simple, then how would you rate my Dad's old friend, who's one of the best diesel mechanics you're likely to find - I could `think' rings around him, but I sincerely doubt I could ever be as good a mechanic as him. My ability to think effectively in the abstract doesn't translate particularly well into grasping what's going wrong with a complex piece of machinery that pretty much has a mind of it's own. His ability to understand how bits of the physical world interact with each other doesn't necessarily translate well into grasping how a program works.
Abstract thinking is wonderful stuff, but it isn't the be-all and end-all of the world. The basic assumption behind many of these posts, that the kind of abstract thinking that we all do, all the time, and often get payed lots of money to do, is somehow the only form of intelligence worthy of the name is fundamentally wrong.
To get back on topic . . .
This research doesn't say anything about a causal link between high numbers of synapses in the brain and in intellectually challenging job. Neither does it say anything about the converse.
What the research seems to show (according to the report - I haven't read the original paper) is that people in some types of jobs (engineers and teachers were the examples cited) have higher numbers of synapses in a particular part of the brain. Not the whole brain, merely a particular part. What this suggests to me (though I'm not a neuroscientist) is that that particular part of the brain is primarily where the kind of abstract thinking that engineers/teacher/thinkers in general tend to do takes place. Since I'm not a neuroscientist or pshycologist or anything of that ilk I can't comment on how these results relate to current models of brain function, but I wouldn't be surprised if these were quite important findings - researchers don't normally get excited about stuff that's not important.
Whatever the case, it'd be a really good idea if people got over this - yes you're intelligent and yes you probably have the same kind of synaptic complexity that these people are talking about, but Who Cares!!! It doesn't mean anything in the real world. The only real way to judge intelligence is by what it does, not by how many brain cells made it happen.
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
> Recent medical research has shown that even mature adults form new synapses, and even grow new brain cells, totally shattering the myths. I don't recall where I read this...
There was a note about the latter in Scientific American within the last year or so.
There still seems to be some doubt about how prevalent new cell formation is, and how well they can migrate to other parts of the brain like they do in your formative years. So unless there has been more research published that I haven't heard of yet, I'd say the case is still out on how important the effect is.
As to the synaptic tree, conventional wisdom has long been that you are born with lots, but suffer serious pruning of "unused" synapses, and the pruning is pretty much done by the onset of puberty. This, for some, explains why it is easy to learn to speak a language "like a native" when you are small and very difficult when you are an adult. (For others, it's an explanation of why the male brain shuts down at the onset of puberty.)
However, it has also been conventional wisdom that learning requires some kind of change of "brainal" configuration. But I think CW has been that this is done by changing the strengths of synapses rather than the number of synapses.
If this new research proves to be evidence for the latter, then it is part of the ongoing revolution in our knowledge about the brain's life cycle. But based on nothing more than the linked article, a lot of unanswered questions remain, so this, like the genesis of new neurons, seems to need to be categorized as an exciting new development of as-yet unknown importance.
As for your damage... I know studies have shown that the brain has an amazing ability to route around certain kinds and scales of damage. But I don't recall hearing that anyone has previously shown this to be the result of new cells or new ramification of the synaptic tree. If they have, then the new news isn't really news at all. If not, then the new news may provide the low level explanation for the phenomenon.
Just my opinion... feel free to educate me.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This agrees with my own experience. The kids at college who got first class degrees weren't the brightest students, they were the ones who put in the most work.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think a lot of people (wrongly) think the "smartest" people are those in the sciences, like engineering or biology, etc. While it does take a lot of brain power to hash through many scientific problems, I see the real problem as being not giving credit to other areas of expertise.
For example, the art of sale. Now I could sit down and code an RCM module for the latest e-commerce site out there, but could I sell it? No way. I don't have the talent to make people want to buy from me. People who can do that, in my mind, have a gift that I don't. One that is normally not equated with "intelligence", yet in its own merrit is pretty challenging.
Another example, football (pick a sport). I think a lot of geeks think of sporting as just a bunch of dumb jocks, but when you really look at it, all the stuff that's involved in a game like football is no different than you getting on the computer and playing Starcraft, or playing Chess. Its a lot of strategy (of course atleticism does count).
What I think these all have in common (and my point in all this) is that I think the proffesions that are truely "intellectual" proffesions are the ones that make you think on your feet. The ones that make you APPLY what you've learned. If I had to make the same HTML templates all day, every day, it would be no different than flipping burgers, even though I'm doing something with "computers", in the sense that a) I'm not doing anything new, and b) nothing changes so I'm not forced to use any other part of my brain.
I think the reasons there were more synapses in fields like engineering and teaching are because you constantly have to "relearn" what you're doing for any given situation, because every situation has its own set of rules and outcomes. Any job where you have to adapt like this in any way, I can see being one that uses a lot of "brain power".
The laziness you mention is just one manifestation of our "gimme-gimme, now-now" culture. Nobody wants to bother to read the manual. Nobody wants to actually have to learn anything. Delayed gratification is as welcome in the general populace as it is in your average two-year-old.
Computer use has been reduced to an unskilled labor position. That sounds funny, doesn't it? But of course, many of you doubtless say, using a computer is unskilled labor position. Surely I'm not suggesting that it ever was, or that it should be?
Why, yes; that's exactly what I'm suggesting. Think about it. It wasn't all that long ago that you'd have been regarded as either a starry-eyed lunatic or a hopeless simpleton if you had suggested that computer programming, computer administration, or computer use should be counted as unskilled labor, requiring no prior skills or special training. Today, the reverse of this occurs. To suggest that there's anything to it is to foster "elitism", a verbal icon for the tired old idea that hard work and genuine skill can ever produce more competence than can sloth and slackery. Sorry, but it's true.
What's pushing this insanity is the market economy (and the media culture). The pressure to demonstrate stellar revenue growth on each and every corporate quarterly report drives those who pander software to do completely stupid things. They have to sell their goods to people who are completely and utterly unskilled. Why? Because there are more of them, and they've got money, that's why.
Vendors cannot require even average intelligence for the learning and use of their software, lest half their market be cut off from them. Consequently, they aim to create software that even an ADHD child could use, thereby restricting all of us to a childish level of interaction with our computers. It's embarrassing. Welcome to America.
It's like trying to read only comic strips and calling this literature. It's insulting. Yes, it takes time, work, and dedication to learn to read well enough to handle the Great Books rather than mere comic strips. But it's also worth it. Reduced to a level a discourse that even a quasi-illiterate child could fathom, our entire society suffers, leaving us all impoverished.
This zero-learning-curve principle for software is hardly the only force driving software manufacturers to previously unimaginable levels of idiocy, but it's a critically important, and the one which explains your own observation. Other factors include the notion that customer is always right, that more features are better, that software can in later releases have post-design features haphazardly accreted onto it like a child's fort at a junkyard, that flexible tools are only for professionals, that it's better to get a bad product out now than a good product out later, and that lack of backwards compatibility drives sales.
Our society is, as you indirectly observe, full of lazy people. They don't want to work for anything. They just want it handed to them on a silver platter, already raised and slaughtered and packaged and cooked and salted and cut up into bite-sized pieces to feed to their kiddies--and themselves.
Well, I've got sad news. Computers require skills. They do not produce jobs for unskilled laborers. But with books on the market with titles remarkably close to "Teach Yourself Brain Surgery in Five Days", or "How to Be a Concert Pianist in Ten Hours of Easy Listening", or "Wiring Your Backplane for Dummies", or "Become an Air-Traffic Controller Overnight", you see what's going on.
Computers aren't for the unskilled. It's not a television. It's not a garage door opener. Sure, you can get those things, but that's just the tip of the iceberg--the iceberg that's going to sink your boat. You can't be a systems adminstrator without prior skills. You certainly can't be a programmer without developing some serious skills. You can't even adminstrate a computer without developing serious skills.
Yet nary a day passes me by that someone whose idea of computers is limited to Word Perfect or Microsoft Word comes to me and effectively asks, "How can I use Perl to program my CGI script to handle a multistage shopping cart with distributed database connectivity, animated vector graphics, secure transactions, robustness in the face of complete systems failure, and online credit card verification -- and which scales to a thousand hits per second?" They have absolutely no programming background whatsoever. I gently (or sometimes, ungently) explain that you can't possibly teach them enough in a day, or three, for them to be able to do this, and no, there is no online tutorial either.
"But surely, computers are easy!" they retort. "The Web is therefore easy. Programming must be easy, too." This whole exchange really pisses them off. They've heard all this from millions of adverts, that anybody can do any of this, and that anybody can get rich quick without years of study. They've heard it so often that they're sure that those few of us who tell them otherwise must necessarily be lying to them. They saw it on TV, so it must be true, and we "professionals" (sorry, that's the old word; the new word is "elistist"; same thing) have to feeding them a line of bull to protect our own income streams.
When someone can't even manage to use Legos, they'll never be able to construct a skyscraper in a day or three of study. You just can't get there from here. Why do they think they should be able to? Because of the Big Lie that anyone can do anything they want with computers without learning squat. Without working. Instantly.
There's a reason people go to school for years to learn this kind of thing, and have professional internships to develop job skills. You can't just expect an illiterate street person to do this job. But people do. They really do. They think managing a computer (being a sysadmin) must be as easy as putting gas in their car, and that programming one must be as easy as adding oil to that car. Well, it isn't. This isn't unskilled labor. It never will be. Time to burst their bubble. This is the kinder thing to do than giving them false expectations of something for nothing.
It will, not, of course, happen. Corporate greed and sound-byte media coverage will see to it that the lies are left intact. But nobody will ever be happy, because lies remain lies.
Now as I have taken my interests into more scientific areas I can't hardly sleep anymore becuase I am always trying to invent some crazy new concept in my head. I can't count the number of things I have thought out completely from beginning to end and the said "well that was fun, lets move on"
The point of all this is that when you work in a high-thought area you really become used to figuring things out and suddenly you find yourself doing it automatically. Therefore it only stands to reason that you would self-teach yourself as you progress.
I guess we could think of the brain like just about any other part of the body, when a body part is put to work alot it (particularly muscle) grows. If our brain is using up all it synapses figuring out things like lines of code in the newest Playstation game or how to build a stunt kite powered by the Biesfield-Brown effect, it has to create some new synapses to do the rest of the thinking.
Incidently it would be a great experiment to test the IQ of a person as they start a job and test it again a about 10-20 years after they start the job. (Sorry if that was in the article I didn't read it)
We all know the only thing that creates more brain synapses is coffee.
This has been "proven" by the fact that the only time I produce any good code is after about a pot of the stuff.
Speaking of that, I think I hear that my coffee's ready... Maybe when I'm finished drinking I'll think of something interesting to say.
(sigh) Probably not! Nature or Nuture?
The answer is Nature and Nuture.
The pursuit for easy-to-use and intuitive interfaces is creating a generation of lazy computer users, and worse, a generation of lazy computer programmers that won't survive outside an IDE with context-sensitive help and syntax highlighting. And bad programmers create bad programs.
If they were young (in their twenties) then this might be interpreted as being a result of fundamental differences in brain structure, but if they were older than that it might simply be that their experiences over time effected the structures.
Probably the only way you could come up with a causal link between synaptic complexity and the `intellectualism' of your profession would be with a long term study, starting with children and following them through to middle age . . . Which is bit of a problem, really - by the time they'd collected enough data over a long enough time to get reasonable results, we'd probably know enough about our brains to make the results moot . . .
In any case, these findings are interesting, but they're hardly earth shattering. I mean, one of the researchers was quoted as saying that they back up observations made on animals - human brains may be vastly more complex than any other animal's, but they're still made of the same stuff, so it's not that surprising they seem to develop similarly . . .
himi
My intellectualism is exponential - it decays exponentially with time after my last caffeine hit . . .
My very own DeCSS mirror.
While I'll admit your chances of living through open heart surgery performed under any kind of crash course aren't very good, so this might not make the best analogy, but I for one would take more comfort in the fact that the programmer would have a better retention for knowledge then the night watchman.
*Disclaimer*, this is not an insult to any employees of the all night chicken shack.
First of all, what the current belief WAS, up until the last year, was that adults could not create new *neurons* (brain cells), but everyone agrees that adults continue to create new dendrites (branches off of neurons) and synapses (junctions between dendrites and parts of other neurons), although at a slower rate than young children.
. htm , this October...
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I once found a videotape showing, side by side, time lapse footage through a microscope of an 8-year-old brain and a 40-year-old brain, and man, that 8 year old's dendrites were running circles around the 40 year old's. I showed it to a kid I was tutoring, to try to convince him he had to make the best use of his peak brain-growing years.
But over the last two years, neuroscience has been turned upside down with discoveries that animals, including mammals, DO continue to create new neurons throughout adulthood. The old view was largely an old wive's tale, handed down for several generations. Much like the unquantifiable and meaningless malarkey that we only use 10% of our brain.
from http://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/99/q4/1014-brain
"...Princeton scientists have shown that new neurons are continually added to the cerebral cortex of adult monkeys. The discovery reverses a dogma nearly a century old
'This is an absolutely novel result,' says William T. Greenough, director of the neuroscience program at the University of Illinois' Beckman Institute. 'These data scream for a reanalysis of human brain development.' "