From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Wed 16 Oct 2002 - 15:58:49 GMT
> As Alan Alda demonstrated on PBS tonight in a Scientific American look
> at the brain, the areas where things are processed in the brain move
> around to accomodate the needs of the moment. For example, a person
> who volunteered to wear a blindfold and learn brail for a week saw the
> activity of using touch move from the prefrontal lobe of her brain to
> the back of the brain where sight is noramlly processed. The activity
> was watched on MRI scan. After she took off the blindfold, the area
> of brain activity returned to its previous location for both sight and
> touch. So to say that processibng of data resides only in one
> particular part of the brain seems false. Another case looked at a
> girl who had the left half of her brain missing from birth.
> She still learned language and all of the things that are supposed
> to
> reside on the right side of the brain nearly as well as a person with
> a whole brain. Her ability to control her right hand and arm were,
> however, inhibited but not uncontrolable. Her right brain took up
> the jobs that were normally the function of a fully functional left
> brain.
>
> The processing that goes on in the brain seems to be a moveable feast.
>
There is a plasticity-canalization dialectic going on. Certain things can
never be learned as well for the rest of one's life as they would have
been had they been learned in the critical period for mastering the
skills. Language and mathematics are two examples of this
phenomenon.
>
> Grant
>
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> ===============================================================
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===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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