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Myths about the brain

nautil.us

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Re: Myths about the brain

#71

Post by Borrible »

It's funny, some argued 'myths' were a tool of the brain to explain the world and are one side of a spectrum with rationality the other, but they still linger in every thought.

"Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology."

Adorno, T. W., and Max Horkheimer. [1947] 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Rational thought in western philosophy is closely related to 'Gnothi seauton'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself

With science, as the foremost form of rationality today, of the opinion, the 'self' residing in the brain. Which may be an albeit practical myth of the brain to explain itself to itself.

Re: Myths about the brain

#72

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

cknizek wrote: post #11
feoren wrote: post #3

> [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 believe the "specialized brain regions" idea has been over-debunked. It was the source of so much woo woo in the late 20th century (are you right-brained or left-brained!?) that we've come to think it's complete bunk. I still see PopSci articles with a title along the lines of; "Scientists have discovered the part of the brain responsible for X". Even in studies or experiments in the literature, I still see color…

And remember that those pictures are themselves the result of lots and lots of clustering and dimension reduction, so are about as useful as cluster analysis of unsupervised data (which is what they are), that is not particularly useful at all.

I mean, the actual problem is that fMRI is expensive, and gives good spatial understanding, but bad temporal understanding (i may be mixing this up, I haven't seriously looked at any brain research in about a decade).

The statistical problems in fMRI are sadly unappreciated, much like the statistical problems in human research more generally.

Re: Myths about the brain

#73

Post by Terry_Roll »

rdmirza wrote: post #51
Terry_Roll wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Wow, this is appalling medical advice. Perhaps diet, exercise, and evidenced based treatments would be a good place to start.

You know where pub med and google scholar is, perhaps you should start with Nobel prizing winning Prof Bruce Ames Triage theory for starters, his paper is on his website.

I guess you are not Japanese because they are about 10years ahead of everyone else on vit K studies, but its likely you do know something because vitamin RDA's do control the behaviour of populations. Personality and behaviours is massively controlled by our diet and you dont this many people living on a planet in close proximity without some dietary changes to manipulate people into docility.

Re: Myths about the brain

#74

Post by treeman79 »

Terry_Roll wrote: post #47
treeman79 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suffered some minor strokes. Right left brain stuff was interesting. Lost ability to hand write. But could draw fine. Right side of body became very weak and numb. Some mental stuff was fine. Others were not. Last I looked up it seemed to match left and right brain theory. Creative vs math side, etc.

Quoted post unavailable.

Factor 5 Leiden. A genetic clotting disorder was the major underlying cause. I was poisoned a few years ago and that caused it to go crazy.

2 days without blood thinners and symptoms start returning hard.

Re: Myths about the brain

#75

Post by andrewjl »

jbandela1 wrote: post #19

I think this article focuses on too much on some nuances of neuroscience, that in the end it becomes misleading. I guess a similar example would be making a statement like, all programming languages are equally useful since they are all Turing complete. It has some basis of truth, but is very misleading as in the real world, Javascript and QBasic are used in radically different ways. Though I no longer am practicing…

Really interesting perspective, thank you for sharing.

Matching specific parts of the brain with physiological jobs seems reasonable enough because its testable. I'm wondering how does one empirically verify potential matches when it comes to psychological jobs? A lot of psychology isn't all that objective, necessarily so. But because psychological events or states can't be as objectively well-defined as physiological phenomena are, what does matching a given part of the brain to a psychological event or state really tell us?

Re: Myths about the brain

#76

Post by neurocat123 »

> Scientists have believed for a long time that severe damage to the visual cortex in the left side of your brain will leave you unable to see out of your right eye, assuming that the ability to see out of one eye is largely due to the visual cortex on the opposite side. Yet more than 50 years ago, studies on cats with cortical blindness on one side showed that it is possible to restore some of the lost sight by cutting a connection deep in the cat’s midbrain. A bit more damage allowed the cats to orient toward and approach moving objects.

I've presented on blindsight before, the phenomenon where a person cannot describe or draw items that are presented in one side of their visual field, due to trauma to their primary visual cortex (V1), but they can still guess what these items are above chance level, direct their gaze to them, reach for them and so on. The superior colliculus seems to play a large role in this, and there are also visual projections that bypass V1, which could be partly responsible for the phenomenon. But this tidbit about "cutting a connection deep in the cat's midbrain" is new to me. Does this ring a bell for anyone?

Re: Myths about the brain

#77

Post by bonoboTP »

passivate wrote: post #34
feoren wrote: post #3

> [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…

>This is not a rebuttal to the myth. Imagine I'm talking about a car, You're simply asserting that the car is analogous to the brain to make an argument. Humans designed the car and fully understand how it works. If you take out the engine - it doesn't run. The brain is not the same - tons of evidence of neural plasticity. There is simply no analogy here. Also, the author is a subject matter expert in cognitive neuro…

> If you take out the engine - it doesn't run

And there are parts of the brain that you can reliably take out and damage specific things like speech/language or facial recognition.

Re: Myths about the brain

#78

Post by lr4444lr »

Terry_Roll wrote: post #47
treeman79 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suffered some minor strokes. Right left brain stuff was interesting. Lost ability to hand write. But could draw fine. Right side of body became very weak and numb. Some mental stuff was fine. Others were not. Last I looked up it seemed to match left and right brain theory. Creative vs math side, etc.

Quoted post unavailable.

There are a lot of people who take vitamin B megadoses daily. Also, Americans are not known for getting much calcium. If micronutrients were really this powerful in clinical use, you'd simply expect to see a lot more miraculous recoveries anecdotally than we actually do.

Re: Myths about the brain

#79

Post by passivate »

bonoboTP wrote: post #77
passivate wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is not a rebuttal to the myth. Imagine I'm talking about a car, You're simply asserting that the car is analogous to the brain to make an argument. Humans designed the car and fully understand how it works. If you take out the engine - it doesn't run. The brain is not the same - tons of evidence of neural plasticity. There is simply no analogy here. Also, the author is a subject matter expert in cognitive neuro…

> If you take out the engine - it doesn't run And there are parts of the brain that you can reliably take out and damage specific things like speech/language or facial recognition.

Yes and no. The brain is complicated, and we have a lot left to understand about it.

https://www.webmd.com/brain/news/20191119/they-had-half-thei...

Re: Myths about the brain

#80

Post by bonoboTP »

passivate wrote: post #79
bonoboTP wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you take out the engine - it doesn't run And there are parts of the brain that you can reliably take out and damage specific things like speech/language or facial recognition.

Yes and no. The brain is complicated, and we have a lot left to understand about it. https://www.webmd.com/brain/news/20191119/they-had-half-thei...

Those hemispherectomies were done on children.

Strokes or head traumas can produce very specific loss of abilities in adults.

I am not quite sure why this is being "debunked" now. Perhaps in part as status jockeying, i.e. "I'm ahead of the curve and not stuck with knowledge that was en vogue 10 years ago and all the Discovery-watching plebs has internalized" and in part a strange new dualistic movement that seeks to mystify the brain for some reason, perhaps in service of blank slatism.

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