Introducing the enlarging brain: human cerebellum different (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, June 15, 2020, 11:09 (1409 days ago) @ David Turell

Three posts combined:

dhw: We know that our brains differ considerably from those of our ancestor apes. I didn’t understand the article, and I don’t understand why you think it supports your theory against mine.

DAVID: We will always disagree as to how the advanced human brain was designed. Your method involves design without any knowledge of future needs/requirements, a blind advance. The more changes that are demonstrated the more it would seem foresight design is required.

My method rejects the idea of changes being made in anticipation of new conditions. There is no crystal-ball-gazing. I propose that all the changes are made IN RESPONSE to new conditions.

QUOTE: "I cannot imagine a chimpanzee playing the guitar as dexterously as us, even if they liked to make music," Paxinos pointed out." (David’s bold)

I don’t suppose any of us can. I don’t know of anyone who claims that chimps’ brains and abilities are the same as ours. Why did you bold it?

QUOTE: "This landmark study suggests that the way our brains plan our movements takes into account not only the muscles we think we might need to flex, but also whether we believe the outcome of this movement will be rewarding. As we currently understand it, the cerebellum receives two basic types of information: what we plan to do when we make a movement, and the actual result of that movement (as seen by our eyes and felt by our skin/muscles)".

DAVID: Our larger cerebellum is more involved with our larger cerebrum than in animal brains. Note the bold. The endorestiform nucleus means we can do a whole lot more with our fingers than apes can. Looks certainly like the sapiens brain made for future functions, anticipated by a designer, but no cell committees would have thought of them.

So God dabbled with the chimp brain because he knew that humans would want to play the guitar! May I suggest that just as the brains of illiterate women, taxi-drivers and musicians complexify in response to their special activities, our brains enable us to do more with our fingers, because our dualist souls or our materialist thinking parts of the brain thought up a new concept, the implementation of which required changes to the brain (complexification). All changes were in sequence from the initial concept to the mastery of the instrument. No need for your God to dabble with the brain and say to the patient: “Now you can invent, make and learn to play the guitar.” Earlier brains would also have responded to new requirements by restructuring themselves (through complexification and expansion).

Your second article vastly expands the function of the cerebellum:

"'The executive function networks are way overrepresented in the cerebellum," Marek said. "Our whole understanding of the cerebellum needs to shift away from it being involved in motor control to it being more involved in general control of higher-level cognition."
“The researchers are now investigating whether such individual differences in cerebellar networks correlate with intelligence, behavior, personality traits such as adaptability, or psychiatric conditions."

DAVID: These are surprising new findings showing how advanced our brain is compared to apes. All great evidence of the thoughtful design planning for our complex future activities.

Once more: I don’t think any of us need to be told that our brain is more advanced than that of the apes. These surprising new findings make me more unwilling than ever to attribute individual functions to individual parts of the brain. All the cell communities must cooperate to produce our activities. What is far more interesting than the fact that we are more advanced than the apes is the extent to which our material brains are responsible for our cognition, intelligence, behaviour etc. In other words, the clash between materialism and dualism.