The eyes of squids are right side out, unlike ours. I wonder what other animals have the "correct" version of these features.
Quirks of Human Anatomy
21–30 of 109 posts
Re: Quirks of Human Anatomy
#22> f. Nipples are useless in human males (cf. Ch. 5). When I was a kid, I got my tonsils removed "because they were useless and a source of illness". I've recently heard that tonsil removal is now more disputed: it may collect filth, sure, but it may also prevent it from going deeper into the body, which may cause more serious illnesses. Given its vast complexity, and the timeline of its creation/evolution, I remain s…
There's also a difference between having no immediate use, and having no reason to exist. From what I understand, sexual differentiation works by having the Y chromosome act as a switch, and both sexes have to share the same blueprint with hormones guided the development of their organs.
For males not to have nipples, they'd need to be actively destroyed, which poses a risk for females to also not have nipples, which is much worse than males having harmless, inactive nipples.
Re: Quirks of Human Anatomy
#23> f. Nipples are useless in human males (cf. Ch. 5). When I was a kid, I got my tonsils removed "because they were useless and a source of illness". I've recently heard that tonsil removal is now more disputed: it may collect filth, sure, but it may also prevent it from going deeper into the body, which may cause more serious illnesses. Given its vast complexity, and the timeline of its creation/evolution, I remain s…
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Re: Quirks of Human Anatomy
#24How about feeling the hand even after amputation. What do you think, why is it so?
its part of the learning process...the model still keeps the hand present
Re: Quirks of Human Anatomy
#25This is how future codebases will be analysed. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Evolution been doing Agile for aeons. Responding to change over following a plan ...
Yes, don't give a crap about doing it right so all your costs instead move into support and maintenance (which in this analogy is healthcare)
Re: Quirks of Human Anatomy
#26There are occasional cases of male lactation reported in humans. Very rare though. In the guinea pig, the large head at birth is provided for by the carteliginous symphysis joint in the hips detaching. However unless the animal gives birth early enough (which always happens in the wild), they lose this capability and die if impregnated later. Some doctors thought it a good idea to try to emulate this in humans by cut…
seems to be heavily affected by hormones as many trans women end up experiencing some level of lactation while undergoing hormone replacement therapy.
Re: Quirks of Human Anatomy
#27> The hole in the retina is sizeable (~9 full moons in the sky), but we don’t notice it because [...] (2) our brain automatically fills in gaps in our visual field by interpolation I still remember this bit from school and various pop-sci book, but is it actually true? Is there really some group of neurons in the brain somewhere that actively tries to restore the "raw" visual information that was blocked by the blind…
I've read a number of consciousness books and this idea that the brain is inpainting the blind spot. I know Dennett in his "Consciousness Explained" book of 30+ years ago did his best to debunk that idea.
The problem with inpainting is that it suggests there is a generator that knows how to fill in that spot before the "witnessing" part of the visual system then gets to work. This is perhaps best thought about from a more extreme example of dreamining: witnessing visuals with the eyes complete closed. In short, the visual system isn't like a projector screen with the finish fixed-up image that some interior witness views.
I believe that most researchers have a very different model, that of the controlled hallucination. What we experience isn't the photons hitting the array of rods and cones like a 2D array of pixels. Instead, we have an internal model of what we are looking at and visual input is there to provide feedback to keep the model of the world updated. The blind spot isn't experienced because we aren't looking at the 2D grid of pixels -- our model is coherent, and the presence of the blind spot simply means that no corrective feedback comes from that area of that one eye.
One compelling bit of information is there while there are neurons feeding processed visual information forward into the brain, there are more feeding back from that area to the visual system. That is, the the visual system is providing error signals and not the image we are experiencing. When something not predicted appears, the visual system sends forward information guiding the internal model to be updated.
Have you ever had the experience where you have been asked to close your eyes and put into a novel environment before then being allowed to open your eyes? It takes less than a second, but you can feel a moment of disorientation while your brain builds that world model. Another way is via some optical illusions (Necker Cube) or Escher drawings. You can look at a part of the drawing and everything is fine, but then as you change your focus there is a transitory feeling of unease as that world model is in flux as it tries to resolve the new visual input with the model it had been using.
Re: Quirks of Human Anatomy
#28Part of this reads like a shortlist of things that doctors and scientists don’t know enough about yet. If you’re looking for a PhD topic, here are some ideas.
Re: Quirks of Human Anatomy
#29> f. Nipples are useless in human males (cf. Ch. 5). When I was a kid, I got my tonsils removed "because they were useless and a source of illness". I've recently heard that tonsil removal is now more disputed: it may collect filth, sure, but it may also prevent it from going deeper into the body, which may cause more serious illnesses. Given its vast complexity, and the timeline of its creation/evolution, I remain s…
> Who would let a junior dev trim bits, or boldly modify a decades old codebase?
"Chesterton's Fence": you shouldn't tear down a fence (or a piece of code) until you understand exactly why it was put there in the first place.
Re: Quirks of Human Anatomy
#30> The hole in the retina is sizeable (~9 full moons in the sky), but we don’t notice it because [...] (2) our brain automatically fills in gaps in our visual field by interpolation I still remember this bit from school and various pop-sci book, but is it actually true? Is there really some group of neurons in the brain somewhere that actively tries to restore the "raw" visual information that was blocked by the blind…
I've read a number of consciousness books and this idea that the brain is inpainting the blind spot. I know Dennett in his "Consciousness Explained" book of 30+ years ago did his best to debunk that idea. The problem with inpainting is that it suggests there is a generator that knows how to fill in that spot before the "witnessing" part of the visual system then gets to work. This is perhaps best thought about from a…
I was going to say the same thing. When we look at a book, we see the book in our minds, not a picture of a book. The processing that happens in our brains works to create the representation, it’s not transforming one image into another.