Myths about how the brain works • Hacker News Board

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#31

Post by earthboundkid » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

chaosite wrote: post #5

killtimeatwork wrote: post #2

> The 21st century is a time of great scientific discovery. Cars are driving themselves. These are the first two sentences of the article and already I'm skeptical. I'd say the self-driving cars are mostly a product of recent technical inventions and not scientific discovery - the scientific discovery happened mostly in the XX century, with discoveries which made integrated circuits, or lasers (for lidar) possible. T…

You're being overly pedantic over the exact difference between "scientific discovery" and "technical invention", a discussion which is completely irrelevant to the article. That line isn't even important to the article, it's just a bit of flowery language intended to frame the subject of myth vs. fact.

Okay, but pedantry aside, the 20th century kicked the 21st century's ass when it comes to scientific discovery. Some stuff discovered between 1900 and 1920:

- Relativity

- Atomic nuclei

- Darwinian modern synthesis

On the technological application side, there was the airplane and mass production of cars, plus the growth of telephony and radio.

In the 21st century we have:

- found a bunch of extra solar planets but the work really started in the 90s, lol

On the application side, we have the cellphone/smartphone revolution and continued penetration of the internet, plus consumer EVs and solar panels. Not nothing, but the smartphone is the biggest change to daily life. Everything else is more just refinement of what came before.

I can't really think of other things that are profound scientific discoveries versus technical applications or filling in of minute details. We're just clearly in the far side of the S curve now, and the 20th century was the rollercoaster.

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#32

Post by nullserver » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

ianhanschen wrote: post #28

anaphor wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually the right hemisphere is linked with comprehending speech/writing, rather than producing it, so it's interesting that you lose the ability to write. Is your speech affected at all? It could be because writing involves a bunch of other more domain-general brain functions too I guess.

I think he's talking about motor control - how the left hemisphere is responsible for controlling the right side of the body and vice versa.

Correct. Right side body is numb, cold and weak. So I assume issue is left side of brain.

I can read and speak well enough. Thinking is harder, so I tend to stay quiet.

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#33

Post by ramzyo » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:03 PM UTC

MrDrDr wrote: post #3

There are lots of popular tropes of how our brain works and I'd agree with this author that they are oversimplified and generally incorrect - I'd add the left brain right brain divide to the list. However the author appears to be arguing from a position that they (or someone) actually know how the brain works - having done a neuroscience degree, my one take home was that when it comes to modelling the brain against o…

> However the author appears to be arguing from a position that they (or someone) actually know how the brain works

Interesting that you had this takeaway, I didn’t get a sense of this at all. My takeaway was that the author presented modern findings (which constitute our present model for how the brain works, speaking nothing to a notion of some absolute correctness) to dispel older hypotheses that are disprovable based on the latest research. As presented, IMO, the author captures well that these modern findings are just a reference point against which to refute the stubborn tropes.

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#34

Post by impartial-word » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:03 PM UTC

ianhanschen wrote: post #6

MrDrDr wrote: post #3

There are lots of popular tropes of how our brain works and I'd agree with this author that they are oversimplified and generally incorrect - I'd add the left brain right brain divide to the list. However the author appears to be arguing from a position that they (or someone) actually know how the brain works - having done a neuroscience degree, my one take home was that when it comes to modelling the brain against o…

I'm upvoting your comment but can you clarify on left brain/right brain? I thought split-brain/callosal syndrome showed us that a lot of our ideas about left brain right brain functional divide were true. Edit for clarification: I was not expecting folks to respond to this by linking split-brain experiments; I am specifically referring to split-brain experiments showing us that our ideas about left brain/right brain…

My son has total agenesis of corpus callosum and he is 100% asymptomatic. We discovered accidentally in the last ultrasound the doctor did and confirmed with magnetic resonance.

The brain is complex.

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenesis_of_the_corpus_callosu...

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#35

Post by meepmorp » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

the__alchemist wrote: post #10

MrDrDr wrote: post #3

There are lots of popular tropes of how our brain works and I'd agree with this author that they are oversimplified and generally incorrect - I'd add the left brain right brain divide to the list. However the author appears to be arguing from a position that they (or someone) actually know how the brain works - having done a neuroscience degree, my one take home was that when it comes to modelling the brain against o…

I had the same reaction to parts. This in particular: > So why does the myth of a compartmentalized brain persist? One reason is that brain-scanning studies are expensive. As a compromise, typical studies include only enough scanning to show the strongest, most robust brain activity. These underpowered studies produce pretty pictures that appear to show little islands of activity in a calm-looking brain. But they mis…

I don’t think your point is more relevant than theirs.

It’s expensive to run brain scanning studies, so studies have smaller populations or lower resolution data collection in response. Yes, brain scanning studies are new, but we’ve been doing fMRI studies for nearly 3 decades and it’s still expensive. Had that cost been scaled back, we’d have more and/or better data because grants are (very) finite.

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#36

Post by Issaclabs » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

earthboundkid wrote: post #31

chaosite wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being overly pedantic over the exact difference between "scientific discovery" and "technical invention", a discussion which is completely irrelevant to the article. That line isn't even important to the article, it's just a bit of flowery language intended to frame the subject of myth vs. fact.

Okay, but pedantry aside, the 20th century kicked the 21st century's ass when it comes to scientific discovery. Some stuff discovered between 1900 and 1920: - Relativity - Atomic nuclei - Darwinian modern synthesis On the technological application side, there was the airplane and mass production of cars, plus the growth of telephony and radio. In the 21st century we have: - found a bunch of extra solar planets but th…

I feel like it was greatly due to the WWII. Those and so many other discoveries were the direct result of programs like project manhattan. Maybe the human species really needs to be pushed to extinction to further tξhe human enterprise or maybe it was just the crazy funding similar to bell labs.

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#37

Post by pessimizer » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

steverb wrote: post #30

MrDrDr wrote: post #3

There are lots of popular tropes of how our brain works and I'd agree with this author that they are oversimplified and generally incorrect - I'd add the left brain right brain divide to the list. However the author appears to be arguing from a position that they (or someone) actually know how the brain works - having done a neuroscience degree, my one take home was that when it comes to modelling the brain against o…

I would further add that those oversimplified concepts of how the brain works have hung around because they are useful for us as an abstraction to think about how our brain works. They may be bad abstractions at a lower level of detail, but for general purposes they seem to be useful enough.

What are they useful for, though? The usefulness of wrong models, and why they hang around so long, mainly seems to be to provide income to people selling solutions.

Solutions offered based on bad simple metaphorical models have the benefit of being intuitive, so they stick around.

Theory-theory is the Efficient Market Hypothesis applied to common sense.

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#38

Post by Geee » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

I wouldn't say that the Triune brain theory is a 'myth'. It's just not accurate, but it's not a complete lie either. There certainly are different parts of the brain that have evolved at different times, and have different functions.

The older parts have evolved to specific functions, while neocortex, which is found in mammals, has a uniform structure and is capable of learning and adapting to different tasks. 75% of human brain is neocortex.

Jeff Hawkings explains the difference between the 'old parts' and 'new parts' pretty well in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EVqrDlAqYo&t=366s

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#39

Post by jessriedel » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

harshreality wrote: post #23

I don't want to be too critical, because I've learned a lot from the author's books, but a fair amount of the article (mainly myths 1 and 2) seem to be over-generalization or skewed based on the author's bias. Her field is psychology, not primarily neuroscience; specifically, the psychology (and some neuroscience of) emotion. I recommend Jeff Hawkins's new book for a perspective closer to a neuroscientist's. (He's te…

Excellent comment overall. One quibble:

> Myth #3: Strong dividing line between diseases of the brain and body

> Everything seems to point to her being right on this one.

The problem is that most of the time people debunk this "myth" they are using some motte-and-bailey tricks.

First, there is no perfect dividing line between disease of the brain and body, but there is also no perfect dividing line between diseases of the brain and differences of the brain (do domestic abusers have bad character or a disease?) or between diseases of different organs. Nevertheless, it is highly useful to have a taxonomy of phenomena that cuts reality roughly at its joints. These divisions have important practical and moral implications, and they fact that there are gray areas does not mean the categories should be undermined.

Second, these seemingly scientific "there is no line" arguments are almost always used asymmetrically by experts to advance a normative position, e.g., my psychological disease should be treated like a physiological disease by the law and my friends because there is no perfect distinction between the psychological and physical. It is possible to go in the other direction and argue that many/most alleged psychological diseases are really just different preferences and should be treated as such; see Thomas Szasz:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5353517/

This is just as well supported by "there is no line" argument as folks who want physiological-psychological disease equality. The reason the latter position is more popularly is based on values.

Re: Myths about how the brain works

#40

Post by EamonnMR » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

While it's not a fixed function pipeline, there is some level of correlation between 'brain damage at site x' and 'effect y' so while phrenology is bunk, the brain is also not just a blob of compute.