Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, October 15, 2013, 14:19 (4056 days ago) @ David Turell

Just look at brain complexity and perhaps you will understand my point of view:-"We have a hundred billion neurons in each human brain," said Nicholas Spitzer, a neurobiologist and co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at the University of California-San Diego (which is partnering with The Atlantic on this event). "Right now, the best we can do is to record the electrical activity of maybe a few hundred of those neurons. Gee, that's not very impressive."-http://www.theatlantic.com/events/archive/2013/10/in-conversation-with-neuroscientists/280146/-"As your readers may know, the nerve cells or neurons in the brain communicate with each other through the release of chemicals, called neurotransmitters," Spitzer said. "This allows a motor neuron that makes a muscle contract signal to the muscle to say, 'time to contract.' It seems like kind of a clumsy way to organize a signaling system."-But sometimes, those neurons change "jobs" ... a motor neuron might start signaling another function in the body, for example.-"We thought for a long time that the wiring of the brain was a little bit like the wiring of some sort of electronic device in that the connection of the wires in the 'device,' the brain, are fairly fixed. What we're finding is that the wires can remain in place, but the function of the circuit and the connection of the wires can change," Spitzer said. "This is something of a heresy."-"What's next for neuroscience? "The elephant in the room is developing a theory of the mind," said Spitzer. "Neuroscientists are proud of what they've learned, but if you're a little tough-minded, you might say, 'Do we actually have a theory of the way in which cognition works, imagination works, creativity operates?' The answer, fundamentally, is 'no.'"-The living brain has emergent properties. The brain does not know what you want to think or learn, but it adapts to that automatically when you do those things. This plasticity is supposed to have conjured itself up by chance, if you accept any part of Darwin's theory. Poppycock still fits.