

Why we don't need a brain - ks
http://blog.ketyov.com/2011/03/why-we-dont-need-brain.html

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wccrawford
I thought this was going to be a parody of all those 'you don't need' posts we
see all the time, where someone goes off the rails about how some useful tool
is totally unnecessary.

Instead, it's actually about the brain, how versatile it is, and ... Well,
absolutely nothing about not needing one.

Yes, the title is complete linkbait.

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voytek
Heh. Damn _right_ it's linkbait. My entire scientific outreach efforts are
linkbait. Dude, I talk about _zombie_ brains to the public.

Do you know how hard it is to get the most of the non-science public to care
about science? If I can get people reading about the stuff that _I_ find cool
and mindblowing, and that makes them want to learn more on their own, then
hell yeah I'm going for the linkbait title.

I'm not making money off this site. I don't give a damn about my SEO or
bouncerate or whatever. I write this in my free time because I _love_ the
brain. And hopefully some of that accidentally rubs off on people.

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mvzink
Thank you! I read this thinking, "I wish more scientists would blog about
their research like this!" Very approachable, very informative, and with
citations! Astounding!

There are a lot of people that would love to read this sort of fascinating
stuff, but don't have the technical understanding to read the papers you cite,
for example. Those people are mostly stuck with the occasional Cracked article
along the lines of "6 Insane Bugs You Didn't Know Existed", and Cracked has
linkbait down to a science.

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voytek
Oops, forgot to respond to this! You're welcome. Don't get me wrong, Cracked
can be very good for spurring on interest as well, but sometimes it's good to
have references. :)

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tel
This is astounding! I would have never predicted that people's brains could
regenerate at such a late stage or undergo such rearrangement without loss of
function. It yields light on an implicit assumption of mine—which seems almost
as outdated as phrenology now—that even if the structure of the brain is not
so localized as we might want it to be, a large amount of gross structure is
needed for normal cognitive function.

Instead, plasticity wins out again? The brain will proceed to function given
stimulation and time despite pretty grave odds.

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bh42222
I am not sure that any other animal has evolved to have it's skull and brain
squished hard during birth, like we have. This is why chimps outsmart human
children for the first years of life. We do indeed have a very unusually
plastic brain.

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felipemnoa
That is interesting. I don't think that you can say that the cause is our
brain being squished during birth. I think the child lags behind at first
because it has to do deeper learning and hence it takes more time. i.e. The
brain is learning a lot more patterns, and patterns within patterns, than the
chimp. Remember that a baby is also learning to speak. The child just has a
lot more brain cells it needs to train. Although, a child at one year will
already understand a lot of what you say, not sure about the chimp.

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mapleoin
This article is upside down. The title is the last line in the article: _How
much brain is really necessary?_

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TeMPOraL
The author should rewrite it as a Crab Canon.

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ars
Flagged for the title.

Suggested new title: "How much of the brain is really necessary?"

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ks
Good idea. I was wondering if I should have changed the title, but it's too
late now. Btw, the author of this article is not me, so I didn't gain anything
by it.

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spydum
Plasticity and neuron interconnects seem to be keys here. Regions like the
corpus callosum are immensely interesting. I am curious if we could some how
manipulate animal cells to generate more of these fibers, with a better
distribution and observe the level of intelligence animals exhibit.

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known
[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fluid_and_cry...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelligence)

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scythe
Incidentally, while the cerebrum -- the big, wrinkled top part -- is the
largest part of the brain, and the most well-studied, it actually only
contains a minority of neurons.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron#Neurons_in_the_brain>

The cerebrum has ~16.3 billion neurons, whereas the cerebellum has ~69
billion.

Also, while people missing large parts of their brain can seem to do okay, the
traumatic loss of even a small part of the brain can do severe damage:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area>

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voytek
It's exactly this discrepancy that I find so fascinating! It's what I spent my
PhD on :)

I believe that the two major players here are plasticity and connectivity. If
you lose a critical hub in the network, you're going to be much worse off than
if you lose a loosely connected, plastic region.

That's the point of these two papers:
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20921401> <\- free open access
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21040843> <\- lame closed

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tluyben2
Conversely, why do most people with a full brain exhibit so many signs that
they have none?

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jonsen
A larger volume of code raises the probability of more bugs.

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tluyben2
Yes, thank you; humor, that was intended. But thanks for all the downvotes :)

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Tom77
I think this answers the questions we all have about politicians.

