Brain complexity: memory formation (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, August 27, 2019, 09:51 (1705 days ago) @ David Turell

Thank you for the articles on deep Earth life, plants control breathing, proteins that maintain cell shape and memory function. Your conclusion that they all provide evidence of design seems fair enough to me. It is perfectly logical that all life forms must find means of adapting to or exploiting their environment if they are to survive, but how they all acquired this ability is the great mystery, and I can well understand your belief that a designer designed it.

Although I can’t follow all the scientific stuff on this particularly thread, I’m very interested in the “hint at how brain cells change structure when they learn something”. This is a known fact (we had various examples earlier of the illiterate women learning to read, and of taxi drivers’ and musicians’ brains undergoing such changes). The obvious implication is that the brain does not change before the arrival of new activities but in response to them. Thus one can well imagine that the first pre-humans to leave the trees (for whatever reason) and the first pre-whales to enter the water would not only have adapted their bodies to the new environment but would also have undergone brain change as a result of these new conditions and the need to adjust their behaviour. In the case of pre-humans, so great was the number of new things to be learned that the existing capacity would not have been large enough to cope – hence expansion of the brain: not the result of random mutations or of divine dabbling, but of the brain cell communities responding to new requirements. Just a hypothesis, of course.