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IIRC it’s well known that the left hemisphere processes visual stimuli from the right field of view of both eyes…
> [Myth 1] specific parts of the human brain have specific psychological jobs ... [Rebuttal] Neurons in a brain region called the anterior cingulate cortex are regularly involved in memory, emotion, decision-making, pain, moral judgments, imagination, attention, and empathy. This is not a rebuttal to the myth. Imagine I'm talking about a car, and I say: It's a myth that specific parts of the car have specific functio…
But others are not as localized. And functional areas might even move during phases of plasticity (i.e. being born blind).
So it seems very clear that some functionally distinct regions exist, but researchers still struggle to pinpoint very abstract things like memory, personality, and complex behavior.
This article bothers me a little bit. It makes it sound like the brain is completely structureless, and that the division of brain into "parts" is a myth. I'm not a neurologist but this seems a disingenuous. Surely we know that the limbic system serves a major role in emotions. We know that the hippocampus serves a major role in long term memory formation. The amygdala controls the fear response. Plenty of other exam…
The brain is specialised and differentiated.
However our concepts of what it does are being refined.
Instead of hunting for "the place where happiness lives", imposing ideas from culturally laden folk psychology onto the gelatinous mass... we are moving towards more fundamental notions of complex nervous system axioms. Like seeking, avoidance, arousal, mood, emotional valence, attention.
Brains are fun
To sum up, the new metaphor proposed here asserts that it seems more likely in the light of current research that there are no demarcatable regions nor any regions of predetermined and fixed cognitive functionality in the brain; there are, rather, just "softly" bounded areas that may shrink, enlarge, or be recruited as the current task demands. Furthermore, none of these weakly bounded regions has any specific, preassigned, or fixed function. They all serve as general-purpose processing entities as required by whatever cognitive task is being processed. The whole notion of a place on the brain having a specific identifiable purpose has to be abandoned as an unreliable and outmoded metaphor.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/New-Phrenology-Localizing-Philosophic...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Brain-Appraisal-Cognitive-Neuros...
> [Myth 1] specific parts of the human brain have specific psychological jobs ... [Rebuttal] Neurons in a brain region called the anterior cingulate cortex are regularly involved in memory, emotion, decision-making, pain, moral judgments, imagination, attention, and empathy. This is not a rebuttal to the myth. Imagine I'm talking about a car, and I say: It's a myth that specific parts of the car have specific functio…
I think the key here is that some tasks are very clearly localized, such as speech in Broca and Wernicke. But others are not as localized. And functional areas might even move during phases of plasticity (i.e. being born blind). So it seems very clear that some functionally distinct regions exist, but researchers still struggle to pinpoint very abstract things like memory, personality, and complex behavior.
If you destroy an area and some people lose one particular function, while other people only lose small fragments of the function - which seems to be true of Broca's region - can the function really be said to be localised?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the key here is that some tasks are very clearly localized, such as speech in Broca and Wernicke. But others are not as localized. And functional areas might even move during phases of plasticity (i.e. being born blind). So it seems very clear that some functionally distinct regions exist, but researchers still struggle to pinpoint very abstract things like memory, personality, and complex behavior.
Can we be sure what "localised" means in this context? If you destroy an area and some people lose one particular function, while other people only lose small fragments of the function - which seems to be true of Broca's region - can the function really be said to be localised?
IIRC there are some areas that are localized almost in the sense of a circuit.
Hearing is an example, which needs to process sensory information much faster (and more direct) than ordinary pathways would, in order to be able to construct spatial representation from latency differences.
Wow. Speechless. Maybe it's Broca's aphasia?
It's a sad day when nautil.us is publishing stuff like this. Sigh.
I love articles like this. But I have NO facility or background to evaluate them. Given their premise is "everything you've been told is wrong", how do I know that this one is right? :-/ I just finished Blindsight, which is a SciFi novel but written by PhD Biologist and highly respected in Neurological circles... which pretty much commits to every.single.one. of these 'myths'. Note, this is not an issue of "it's a yo…
If you prefer to pay for this knowledge with just time rather than also money, on YouTube there are three videos from Numenta that cover Jeff's book, and then there's a Ted talk by Anil on consciousness.
Well, the first myth is a complete surprise to me, especially the bit about the lizard brain. I've parroted about it in casual conversation for decades now.