April 20, 2004

Campaign in the membrane: Using M.R.I.'s to See Politics on the Brain [NYT Link] He lay inside an M.R.I. machine, watching commercials playing on the inside of his goggles as neuroscientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, measured the blood flow in his brain.
posted by moonbird 20 years ago
  • Please excuse the extraneous apostrophe. My banana was a tad spotted.
  • The biggest breakthrough in neuroscience is to figure out what functions the brain performs. Just like computer processors don't have a "mouse movement" or a "mp3 player" module, I strongly doubt base neural functions are correlated to what we think the distinct functions are.
  • [banana]
  • I think your scepticism is entirely appropriate, Gyan - there seems to be a lot of this kind of research going on just now, perhaps driven more by a surplus in scanner capacity than by really good research ideas (you may have seen that at Tel Aviv recently they were scanning people while they watched 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly'). But I think the idea that you react emotionally to 'your' candidate and rationally to the opposition is interesting (not sure what a politician can about it, mind you). And I remain hopeful that something really worthwhile will eventually emerge from all the scanning. I'm not one of those people who think data is encoded in the brain in digital form, so that the chief challenge of cognitive science is finding the USB port in your neck: but I also don't think I'd be quite brave enough to say that we'll never be able to read off any interesting stuff about attitudes and even thoughts, from some kind of scan. Nearly forgot - interesting post, Moonbird
  • I'm not letting ANYONE near my USB port!;)
  • So you think. The Wi-Fi is more flexible anyway.
  • If by "flexible" you mean "trivial to hack" then yes, yes it is. And my impression is that the apparent ability of the brain to remap itself to cope with damage is one of the things that makes working it all out rather hard.
  • I always wonder, why if the brain s powerful enough to rewire itself some of it's basic functions on any place of the cortex after sustaining damage, why certain functions, like the ability to read or write, always end up in similar locations for distinct healthy persons?
  • I suppose the position of some functions is probably determined just by simple practicality - the inputs from the ears come in here and the outputs to the mouth go out here, and so this is where the wires usually cross. . But some of it is clearly genetic too. The areas of the brain which control swearing (and moans of pain, orgasmic groans, etc), for example, are unexpectedly separate from the areas which govern articulate speech, apparently for historical/evolutionary reasons. Certain specific kinds of brain damage can leave you unable to speak but still able to swear volubly (and groan, presumably). I believe (I'm posting without checking my references) that animals have an analogue of the involuntary utterance area, but not generally the other one, which raises the possibility that you could teach your monkey to swear much more easily than you could get it to write 'Hamlet'. Sort of figures, I suppose...