The pop psych 'left brain' stuff is bullshit but there are right and left hemispheres. They don't necessarily have to be connected as shown in the OEM diagrams:
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For trivia, there is an X shaped structure called the optic chiasm where half of the optic nerve fibers of each eye cross over to the other hemisphere. It's part of the depth perception process.
I once interviewed with a post-doc who needed a software guy to support her experimentation with rabbits, messing with their optic nerves to try to figure out how it all worked. I sometimes wonder how life would have been had I accepted. She said I'd be listed as a co-author on her research but I was more concerned at the time with base matters like making money. Academic work is fascinating and pays for shit.
No, follow the link I posted. Slicing it in half is an accepted treatment for serious epilepsy. There's still a few peripheral connections but the main pathway is gone.
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Gage started a trend of experimentation of just how much you can screw a brain up before it doesn't work anymore. The answer is a lot.
Prefrontal lobotomies were once in vogue. Basically the doctor stuck an icepick into the brain via the eye socket and waved it around. q.v. 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'.
Hang on, where are your memories stored? Wouldn't this be like deleting half the information you hold? Or is it duplicated? People would forget how to read, write, speak, walk, and half their knowledge would be gone.
Yes I read that part. But I don't understand why the memories aren't de= leted. Maybe they are? Improving your cognitive abilities - you could = still have forgotten a lot of information. Your memories have to be som= ewhere in your brain. Unless it's done like some kind of RAID array, re= moving half the brain should delete half the memories. Or are they all = stored in the other side to the part they remove?
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Riots in Birmingham last month caused over =A31 million worth of improve= ments.
Isn't that like removing one disk from a RAID 0? Only half the data remains. You'd have forgotten 50% of what had happened in your life. Or does your brain have redundancy?
Now there is a damn good question... Many rats and rabbits have died in the search.
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This is where it starts to get chewy:
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AI has been the grail of computing and one of the branches is the study of neural networks. If you assume the neurons communicate via the electrochemical interfaces between the dendrites and other neurons, with high degree of interconnectivity you can try modeling them process mathematically, which computers are good at. Hebb started the ball rolling but there was a little speed bump when Minsky pointed out the model couldn't even handle an XOR.
Hopfield came out with a better model in the early '80s and he was followed by McClellan and Rumelhart.
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I was working in the Boston area in the early '80s and had a couple of seminars concerning neural nets. The groundwork was there but the computing power wasn't. AI shifted toward expert systems, which are just glorified decision trees, and didn't do much for image recognition.
Neural networks are hot again and it's mostly because of the massive increase of computing power since the '80s. They aren't exact models of physiological neural networks because of the back propagation.
Short answer, you kicked over a rock with a lot of strange stuff under it. Like I said if I was starting over again that's where I would be. I had all the pieces but it wasn't the right time to put them together. It's like airplanes; the idea was there and people were building gliders but until lightweight engines were developed it wasn't going to fly, so to speak.
The storage capacity of the human brain interests me:
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Firstly, how do two neurons connecting hold 2.5kB, or 20,000 bits?
Secondly, the page claims the total storage of the brain is 2.5 million = GB - that's only 420 times the storage in my desktop computer (6TB), whi= ch doesn't seem enough to remember everything that's ever happened to yo= u.
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An ostrich=E2=80=99s eye is bigger than its brain.
So we have a lot of redundancy in data storage then. I guess that's maybe why some memories are stronger than others, the more important ones are stored multiple times.
I get begging emails and snailmails from the alumni association. Straight to the trash. In the '60s RPI would trade places with MIT or Stanford for #1 in any given year. Now it's tied #30. That doesn't keep them from charging $52,000 a year. Shirley's got to eke out a living somehow.
Why do they call a University a "school"? Toddlers go to kindergarten or nursery or playgroup. Then from 5 to 12 they go to primary school, and from 13 to 18 secondary school (these two get fudged together in some places, of even have a "middle school"). Over 18s go to college, or if they're clever university. But you can't have a 20 year old at school!
It's never two neurons. The dendrites connect a neuron to many neurons, which in turn connect to even more. Some paths may eventually lead back to the original neuron, forming a very complex feedback loop.
I haven't kept up with the literature but the theory was a given path would store information but there is a lot of arm waving about how.
Yeah, there's massive redundancy. A Sarah McLachlan cover of an old Joni Mitchell song 'River' was just playing. The line 'I wish I had a river I could skate away on' called up an image of a frozen river from decades ago. How the hell does that work?
One rough metaphor is the neurons form an equivalent of resonant circuits. 'river' and 'skate' start their own little resonant circuits that trigger other circuits with the same frequency. Don't take that too literally, but somehow an association triggers other similar patterns.
Then there is thought... I'm not a strict epiphenomenonalist but I do think much of our 'thought' process is a running commentary on what the brain is doing as verbalizations are triggered. It's a short step from there to down the Zen rabbit hole of no-mind.
Because our brains are not very precise. Anything remotely connected will trigger another memory. Have you ever tried thinking of anything in your past and deliberately thinking of something else connected to it? I can do it at about 2 memories per second. But after about 50 of them it drives me round the bend.
What amazes me is our brains are so amazing but they can't understand themselves. Surely something can understand something of it's own level?
Who knows. RPI's full name is Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and it is the oldest engineering university in the US, if not in the English speaking world if you take the narrow definition of 'technological university'. It wasn't until the '60s when it tried to reinvent itself as a 'technological university' rather than an engineering college. Like I said it's was mostly downhill from there.
The 'college' versus 'university' thing is a little cloudy in the US.
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