It's All In The Mind

The Mole went to a talk on understanding the brain yesterday by some famous boffin called Keith Kendrick, who is apparently a Systems and Behavioural Neuroscientist at Cambridge (UK).

All that's waaaaayyyyy above me, but a couple of the things the Mole reported were fascinating.

By the way, the reason I'm including this Female Brain diagram is honestly because I couldn't find the one about men that Prof. Kendrick used to lighten up his talk, apparently. According to the Mole, the elusive Male equivalent of the above included huge sections for things like football match starting times and women's legs, and microscopic glands and nodes devoted to remembering anniversaries and putting the toilet seat back down... If anyone knows of its whereabouts I'll publish it forthwith, it sound good.

So anyway, this guy was apparently talking about how the brain's processing capabilities are still far far and away better than even our best computer, and probably always will be.

Apparently they are discovering that our senses are far more mixed up when we're little kids than when we're older. Some rare brain damage cases have had people experiencing colours as sounds and seeing things as smells, and smelling things as sounds and so on, and this is giving us clues to very early behaviour.

For example, maybe babies put everything into their mouths, not because they just want to ram things down their throats and choke on them, but because the taste and touch senses are intricately linked to the whole sensory system and are more developed than sight, for example, and it is their first way of fully discovering an object.

You may now eat this computer screen to get a real deep feel for my words, you have my permission.

See you in the gene pool

FrabulousFrog