A single neuron may be rather dumb, but it is dumb in many subtle ways. - Francis Crick.
What impresses me about my brain is that when it couldn't become any bigger and still manage to be born of a human mother it figured out all sorts of way to keep evolving like:
1. It got really wrinkled so that it would have more surface area for the new neocortex (is the new redundant there?)
2. It figured out, and this is so cool, how to store things outside of itself. It did this with language and especially poetry and stories, art and then of course alphabetic literacy. Inventing an alphabet, a bunch of abstract squiggles to represent sound was huge. All the above things were huge on our evolutionary path. I image each new thing we learned changed our brain in significant ways adding more neurons and axons and dendrites, etc and hence more capacity for new things. Each new thing, of course, changed the existing culture tremendously. What is amazing is that the separate parts of the brain are rather dumb like Crick says, but the synergy, good grief, it is everything. We are so much greater than the sum of our parts.
What impresses me about my brain is that when it couldn't become any bigger and still manage to be born of a human mother it figured out all sorts of way to keep evolving like:
1. It got really wrinkled so that it would have more surface area for the new neocortex (is the new redundant there?)
2. It figured out, and this is so cool, how to store things outside of itself. It did this with language and especially poetry and stories, art and then of course alphabetic literacy. Inventing an alphabet, a bunch of abstract squiggles to represent sound was huge. All the above things were huge on our evolutionary path. I image each new thing we learned changed our brain in significant ways adding more neurons and axons and dendrites, etc and hence more capacity for new things. Each new thing, of course, changed the existing culture tremendously. What is amazing is that the separate parts of the brain are rather dumb like Crick says, but the synergy, good grief, it is everything. We are so much greater than the sum of our parts.
posted by Anne Coe | 6:22 AM
2 Comments:
Intelligent Design. Or is it Intellectual Design? The nice thing is that the brain evolved all this sophistication without tossing out the instinctive urges, leaving us with interesting behaviors like camp guards and serial whatsits.
There are even theories that this is just window dressing and that we are really still hardwired like bees or ants. What we do is not really our choice.
We are approaching the time when computers will be small enough and demand low enough power that all that remains is the connection to our neurons and we will have auxilliary storage attached to our brain that is faster and bigger than the brain itself. Where, then, will our consciousness choose to reside? yikes.
Ah yes, we are facing a brave new world.
Your argument, Ms Coevert, seems to reify the brain, which, theoretically, initially may only have responded to things (like lizards), rather than being such a good planning instrument. If the brain figured out that stories were repositories of information, it was probably much later and due to observational evaluation (trial and error learning) of something done accidentally, at least very early in human history, that seemed to have a workable function. While there is something to Lamarckianism, when aplied to culture (not genes), I have to wonder how close your argument comes to Lamarckianism. While we may build muscles during our lifespan, our children do not inherit those muscles, just as they don't inherit our synapses, but the capacity to build synapses. I think that the large human brain, from my reading, has been around a long time. Good questions you ask
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