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…
What about using the RB/LB as a metaphor for teaching? I feel like it helps me build a ladder of abstraction for certain concepts as a music teacher. Of course I add the disclaimer that this is not ACTUALLY how your brain works, but all that neuro-jargon isn't really helpful for understanding syncopation...
I learned how to draw from the book “drawing on the left side of the brain”. I’m not so sure about the neuroscience parts, but if you want to draw/paint, get that book.
All my sites looked terrible until I learned to paint.
The issue here is the brain of test subjects aren’t simply doing exactly one thing at a time. Your ears don’t turn off because you’re doing a memory task in an MRI. As such it’s impossible to say what subset of brain activity is directly related to some activity rather than some related mental processes.
The brain is doing multiple things at once. But that doesn't mean its impossible to subset brain activity related to specific activities.
I think I wasn't fair in this comment, because it suggests that it is easy to do, when it actually isn't. For example, a cogntive control task might have an easy and hard condition. You'll end up with significant activation all over the brain for either of them, and their contrast will still have significant differences between the conditions all over the place too (e.g. SMA, pSMA, Anterior Insula, Anterior Cingulate, Posterior Cingulate Cortex, visual and motor cortex, cerebellum, etc. etc. etc.). Because the brain is doing all kinds of things during the task, and any "subroutine" is still going to involve communication between lot of places. But if the idea that function isn't localized, i.e. going back to a naive connectionist paradigm, then, sorry, no. The distribution of activations we get are often quite stereotyped, and if we are more careful and specific with our models we can localize function often even better.
> fish fMRI studies Link for those curious about this comment: (Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Proper Multiple Comparisons Correction)[ https://teenspecies.github.io/pdfs/NeuralCorrelates.pdf ]
As the first author of that paper, I approve of this link.
This doesn’t seem to be true at least for the nervous and immune systems. Probably also the microbiome we host. There’s lots of important stuff yet to be learned with those systems.
I read the parent's comment in terms of how we once viewed life being mysterious, talking about the "elan vital" before we understood DNA. This is often used as an analogy to our current struggle to understand consciousness.
Having done a neuroscience degree myself, I would double on your conclusion — I still have no clue how a brain works, apart of some simpler systems, like visual pattern recognition. I am out of the field for a single-digit number of years already, but in retrospective it is hilarious how all the literature in neuroscience is gently moving around the question of «guys, bit how all of it works»? People are happy to hac…
> fish fMRI studies Link for those curious about this comment: (Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Proper Multiple Comparisons Correction)[ https://teenspecies.github.io/pdfs/NeuralCorrelates.pdf ]
That to me is really how we need to be emphasizing education in science for young people. We tend to give the impression that we’ve figured almost everything out, and so you’re just learning the facts of it all. Really, we’ve carved out a little island in a sea of ignorance, and the foundations of the island are just our current best rough approximations that might collapse. An example from the field I’m in — biology…
The major questions of biology have already been solved, though. The rest is filling in the details.
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…
Having done a neuroscience degree myself, I would double on your conclusion — I still have no clue how a brain works, apart of some simpler systems, like visual pattern recognition. I am out of the field for a single-digit number of years already, but in retrospective it is hilarious how all the literature in neuroscience is gently moving around the question of «guys, bit how all of it works»? People are happy to hac…
> People are happy to hack on single neurons
This is where science communication fails, the general population and even the most curious people still think that there is such a thing as "Jennifer Aniston neuron", but in reality there is "Rachel from Friends neuron" that sits at the top of hierarchy where the signalling converges and then it's highly likely it isn't the only thing it's responsible for (OR gate), but finding what is the hard question. This is speculation stated at about 20min in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1ID0FQN9tg