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Spiders have donut shaped brains. Source: owned a tarantula. Some animals jon't have bilaterally symmetric brains on account of having brains, like jelly fish.
Owned.. and dissected?
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You'd probably get a better discussion from a place like http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/ .
I've tried skeptics-stackexchange but I was not convinced by the arguments.
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Spiders have donut shaped brains. Source: owned a tarantula. Some animals jon't have bilaterally symmetric brains on account of having brains, like jelly fish.
I remember an article saying that esp. in smaller spiders (so probably not tarantulas) the "brain" doesn't really have a simple shape, extending even into the limbs.
Does every animal/insect have two brain hemispheres? For example, what about a spider, or an octopus?
But the mere presence of bilateral interconnectedness doesn't mean that their 'brain' conveys much information or coordinates much activity in those linnaean classess. In all invertebrates, most(?) nervous control arises locally, via clumps of neurons (ganglia). The lower the class, the larger the fraction of control arising locally from ganglia. For example, earthworms have only ganglia (IIRC).
Next question: is it possible to split consciousness at all?
With all animals above worms having bilateral symmetry, the introduction of one side becoming dominant must have ocurred very early in evolution. Thus ALL species with any cortex at all must have circuitry that prevents the bigger parts the nervous system from becoming fully decoupled and 'going' rogue.
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Unfortunately, just having someone tell you something doesn't prove anything, unless you have a way to check that the fact is true- and for most of Kim Peek's life this was not the case. For instance- his article on wikipedia mentions that he " enjoyed approaching strangers and showing them his talent for calendar calculations by telling them on which day of the week they were born and what news items were on the fro…
> but it seems to me like he made a living out of his skills People are downvoting you, maybe for manner in which you're expressing skepticism, but a lot of the issues you bring up are a constant concern in psychology. For example, 1. Clever hans, a horse that was supposed to answer people's questions, turned out to just be responding to auditory/visual cues (seeing people gasp). 2. In the book, Mind of a Mnemonist,…
I'm a bit surprised at the downvotes. I've said things I thought would get downvoted in the past and in the end it turned out I got more ups than downs. But today, in this thread, they're pouring down like rain and it's very unusual.
So, quite aside from the fact I'm losing my high score (hey, I like a game like the next person) I guess I've said a few things that people strongly disagree with. I wonder if it's what you say- the way I express my skepticism, but I'm not commenting in a different style today than in other days. If anything, I was even a bit more guarded today than usual, because there's the matter of disability and all.
I think what's up is that people know Kim Peek as the Rain Man, from the movie, a guy who had a severe disability but nevertheless had an amazing talent, and they're upset at me for saying that maybe he was faking it after all (edit: faking the talent, not the disability; and I'm not even saying he was faking it, just that, like you say maybe he was made larger than life).
The way I read them, a few of the comments in this thread are basically saying that, cooks and entertainers aside, Kim Peek was the real deal. Well, I don't know the guy. I googled him, I looked him up on wikipedia. There are some claims of extraordinary ability. But, if he only did the same things that entertainers do, then his skills were not that extraordinary, only unusual. The fact that he had a mental disability makes them more unusual, but still not so far outside ordinary human potential that he should really get his head scanned by NASA.
So I dont' think I'm being unreasonable to remain skeptical, and demand evidence. I think what's unreasonable is that most other commenters in this thread are simply demanding that I agree with them, just because they know and everyone they know knows that what they say is the way they say it is. Well- sometimes you just have to stop and think how you know what you know.
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No, I just wonder why you came in here doubting it. It's so unlikely that nobody ever thought to check . It's not impossible, but it's certainly unlikely.
What do you mean "why I came in here"? I post here very frequently.
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I've tried skeptics-stackexchange but I was not convinced by the arguments.
At the extreme end, you could try a site like http://lesswrong.com/ . If someone bites, you probably can't expect a more rational argument from anywhere else.
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The problem is that I'm well aware that charlatans do exist [1] but I've no idea why you say that his skils are not under dispute. Does this mean you know of some sort of test, some demonstration in controlled conditions etc? I'd like to see it, too, please. Edit: How was he well-documented? Where is that documentation? ___________________ [1] See (or rather, avoid seeing) here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl…
Because you can put him in a room alone and ask him questions. Many, many people have interviewed and investigated him. He was also severely disabled mentally, he's not a normal guy who is really smart. He was a mentally retarded person who could not care for himself. There was a documentary in which he spoke to neurologist VS Ramachandran and they showed how he was unable to grasp the concept of a metaphor, taking i…
As to his mental disability, I agree that if it's true that some people are mentally disabled (to any extent) in one area, but not in another, that's something surprising and possibly useful to research further.
But- is it true? That people really have an extreme level of development in one faculty, but not others? How do we know that it's true? What are the experiments done that confirm it, if you want to be scientific about it? What is the standard of proof?
Let's look at Kim Peek- people say he did pretty amazing things beause he could calculate your birth day from your birth date and he memorised facts.
OK, well, calculating your birth day is through and through a parlour trick. Here's a guide that says how to do it: [2]. If he had been guessing the card you picked out of a deck, nobody would think he was a savant, but people probably wonder "how the hell did he figure out the date"? It's an algorithm.
The same goes for his powers of recall (it's a parlour trick and something you can train at) except it's also possible to fake it, in the way I suggest above, because nobody really keeps that sort of fact handy and they'll probably not be given the time to check.
So the question really is: was the guy really as mentally disabled as to be unable to learn how to perform those quite traditional parlour tricks?
Right off the bat, the very fact that the two things he's remembered for -calculating birth days and recalling news items- are standard entertainment numbers suggests to me that he trained. Otherwise it's a bit of a coincidence that his unique superpower just happened to be exactly the same one exhibited by trained professionals.
Which also suggests to me his mental disability was not as severe as people think it was, and that instead media reporting has severely distorted our image of his (real) disability.
And for all of the above, I want to know why people insist that he had ("documented") superpowers. Where is the bloody documentation?
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[1] For a thorough, and thoroughly enjoyable, debunking see Cordelia Fine at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jnpyyY8l_Y
[2] http://blog.artofmemory.com/how-to-calculate-the-day-of-the-...
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My problem with that sort of demonstration of amazing memory powers is that I have no way to check the sports scores on the day I was born as quickly as the person who says they're retrieving them from memory does so. Even if I could just google them (there might be some online sports results archive or something- it would still not mean much unless I could find an identical copy of the exact listing the mnemonist me…
The outcomes of historical, national, sporting events are not subjective. It would be easy to check and verify even if you couldn't do it that second you could still after the fact check and call out anyone pretending. With or without the exact identical text the "memorizer" used.
Why is it important to check the source? For the same reason that, when someone adds a reference to a paper, or a wikipedia article, people will often follow the reference and look for where it is exactly that it says what the referrer says it does- and complain if it turns out it doesn't.
So, for instance, if I mention that the minimax algorithm runs in time exponential to the number of nodes in a game tree, and you ask me how I know, and I reply that I read it in the 3d ed. of "AI: A modern approach" by Russel and Norvig, you are well within your rights to open the book, search for this information and, if you fail to find it, ask me whether I'm sure I got my refs right.
And that is true regardless of whether my claim about the running time is true or not- because that's only half the claim. The moment you add a reference your claim goes from "X is true" to "X is stated to be true in Y" and you have to be able to prove that "X is stated to be true in Y", not just that "X is true". And if "X is stated to be true in Y" is not true, but you go on to assume "X is true", then any other claim you make after that is up in the air, because you haven't yet told us how you know that X is true.
Which is important to know, because once you screw up your facts, as you inevitabley will, you (and everyone else) can at least trace your error back to all the things that you know, and the sources you drew that knowledge from, and have a glimmer of a hope to identify the error in your thinking.
Accordingly- if someone claims that "I memorised X from Y", you can check that X is stated in Y. If it is, then fine. If not, not fine.