Introducing the brain: stroke recovery in infants (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, October 11, 2022, 10:16 (772 days ago) @ David Turell

I'm combining the two posts about the brain.

Rewiring in old age

First a correction:

QUOTE: The gathered evidence suggests that in the fifth decade of life (that is, after a person turns 40), the brain starts to undergo a radical “rewiring” that results in diverse networks becoming more integrated and connected over the ensuing decades, with accompanying effects on cognition.

You accidentally left out the following part of the quote, without which your researchers appeared to be contradicting themselves in the quote below:. “According to the researchers, when we are young, our brains are modular, suited to learning specific tasks……

QUOTE: "Around our mid-40s, however, that starts to change. Instead, the brain begins becoming less connected within those separate networks and more connected globally across networks."

I find the rest of the article pretty unhelpful:

QUOTES: […] researchers imaged the brains of six super-agers who [...] died at an average of 91 years old. The researchers compared those brains to those of seven cognitively average elderly people who had died after 80; six younger people who died at 49, on average; and five people who had early Alzheimer’s.
"[bbb] Some of them bbb had cells of the entorhinal cortex (a memory area) that were larger than those of people twenty to thirty years younger.”(dhw’s bold)

Some of the six/seven did, which means some of the six/seven didn’t. We’re not told how many. How can we draw any conclusions from this?

QUOTE: "Episodic memory is the kind that deals with events that happened to you in the past. It’s also one of the first to decline with age.

I’ve never heard of memories that deal with events that happen to you in the future!

QUOTE: "But then, maybe not …

Actually, I think this is meant to be a comment on a headline which David missed out:
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH, “EXERCISE CAN HELP OLDER ADULTS RETAIN THEIR MEMORIES” AT SCIENCEDAILY (FEBRUARY 17, 2022).

QUOTE: "But then, maybe not …"

All the same, it’s not exactly enlightening, is it?

QUOTE: "Recall of every detail of one’s past works out better for some people than for others. Just why some people can recall almost everything that happened to them is a mystery in neuroscience, in part because they are few in number."

It’s really strange, but I’ve also noticed that lots and lots and lots of things work out better for some people than for others. Just why this is so is a mystery in neuroscience, in part because nobody actually knows how the brain works to produce all the different levels of intelligence, memory, consciousness….And just to add to the mystery, some people believe that the brain doesn’t produce these things at all, but they are the products of an immaterial something-or-the-other which resides within us until we die. These people are called dualists, and the something-or-the-other is called the soul.

DAVID: […] all the studies still support my contention the brain is built to help us.

I don’t suppose many people would disagree that our brains help us to do all kinds of things.

Stroke recovery in infants

QUOTE: "A clinical study conducted by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center has found that for children who had a major stroke to the left hemisphere of their brain within days of their birth, the infant's brain was "plastic" enough for the right hemisphere to acquire the language abilities ordinarily handled by the left side, while also maintaining its own language abilities.

DAVID: It makes the same point as the other entry about the brain. Teh brain is built to help us and has the major ability to reorganize itself to satisfy all of our mental needs.

You have offered us articles before about people with half a brain, and all this research seems to me to confirm your final point: the cell communities of which the brain is composed have the major ability to reorganize themselves. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they “satisfy all our mental needs”, but I would certainly emphasize the autonomy of the cells’ ability to reorganize themselves, and that requires intelligence. A theist can of course propose that God was the inventor of the intelligent cell.