Motivation, Visual Perception, and Brains

4 Comments

1. Neal Cohen on November 9, 2006 at 10:10

   What is the next step? Are we in the ear­ly stages of “breed­ing” with technology?

   
   
   
2. Robert Prioleau on November 9, 2006 at 11:00

   Fol­low­ing up on the com­ment about evo­lu­tion of human brain since the Nean­derthal man, is there any evi­dence that the size or poten­tial capa­bil­i­ty of the human brain has increased since ear­ly civ­i­liza­tion (e.g. 3000–2000 BC) ?

   Is there any evi­dence that the brain size or capa­bil­i­ty of “high intel­lect” indi­vid­u­als (e.g. sci­en­tists, musi­cians, philoso­phers, etc) are greater than the aver­age person ?

   
   
   
3. Alvaro on November 11, 2006 at 8:02

   Neal and Robert: Hmmm, Sat­ur­day morn­ing, not cof­fee yet, news­pa­per wait­ing, and you real­ly want me to exer­cise my brain…thanks for your comments! :-)

    

   Neal: we will learn how to deal with new tech­nol­o­gy, using it in our favor, with care (have you heard of deep brain stim­u­la­tion for clin­i­cal­ly depressed peo­ple?). But I don’t think biochips and oth­er “enhanc­ing arti­facts” will be around for a good while.

    

   Robert: I am not an expert in aver­age “brain sizes” over time, let me ask around. Now, what I find more inter­est­ing is that “A new study pub­lished in the jour­nal Nature finds that learn­ing to jug­gle may cause cer­tain areas of your brain to grow.”

   http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=5615

    

   and

   “The sci­en­tists also found part of the hip­pocam­pus grew larg­er as the (Lon­don) taxi dri­vers spent more time in the job
   http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/677048.stm

    

   In gen­er­al, yes, there is evi­dence that brain exer­cise can increase brain weight (more neu­rons, synaps­es and den­drites, all of which are phys­i­cal struc­tures), which would sug­gest Yes to your ques­tion, but am not aware of a good study that com­pares brain sizes of top per­form­ers in dif­fer­ent fields with aver­age cit­i­zens. And, who knows, they may have been dif­fer­ent to start with.

    

   Prob­a­bly anoth­er exam­ple of Nature and Nur­ture danc­ing as a nice couple.

    

   Your thoughts?

   Keep the com­ments coming

   
   
   
4. Alvaro on November 16, 2006 at 1:13

   Robert: you can read an inter­est­ing post on Ein­stein’s brain here

   http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2006/11/a_neuroscientists_l.html

   includ­ing the quote:
   It was Witel­son’s 1999 study of Albert Ein­stein’s brain that made head­lines by reveal­ing some remark­able fea­tures over­looked by oth­er neu­ro­sci­en­tists: the pari­etal lobe, the region respon­si­ble for visu­al think­ing and spa­tial rea­son­ing, was 15 per­cent larg­er than aver­age, and it was struc­tured as one dis­tinct com­part­ment, instead of the usu­al two com­part­ments sep­a­rat­ed by the Syl­vian fissure.