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There are lots of popular tropes of how our brain works and I'd agree with this author that they are oversimplified and generally incorrect - I'd add the left b
by MrDrDr 6y ago
There are lots of popular tropes of how our brain works and I'd agree with this author that they are oversimplified and generally incorrect - I'd add the left brain right brain divide to the list. However the author appears to be arguing from a position that they (or someone) actually know how the brain works - having done a neuroscience degree, my one take home was that when it comes to modelling the brain against our conscious experience - we really don't know anything.
- steverb 6y agoI would further add that those oversimplified concepts of how the brain works have hung around because they are useful for us as an abstraction to think about how our brain works. They may be bad abstractions at a lower level of detail, but for general purposes they seem to be useful enough.
- pessimizer 6y agoWhat are they useful for, though? The usefulness of wrong models, and why they hang around so long, mainly seems to be to provide income to people selling solutions. Solutions offered based on bad simple metaphorical models have the benefit of being intuitive, so they stick around. Theory-theory is the Efficient Market Hypothesis applied to common sense.
- lukas099 6y agoThey are useful as a standard way to talk about the brain. If I say I am 'right-brained' in casual conversation, most people in my culture know what I mean.
- ianhanschen 6y agoI'm upvoting your comment but can you clarify on left brain/right brain? I thought split-brain/callosal syndrome showed us that a lot of our ideas about left brain right brain functional divide were true. Edit for clarification: I was not expecting folks to respond to this by linking split-brain experiments; I am specifically referring to split-brain experiments showing us that our ideas about left brain/right brain were correct. This was in reply to "I'd agree with this author that they are oversimplified and generally incorrect - I'd add the left brain right brain divide to the list" -- I want to know what this person thinks, thanks.
- tamatech 6y agoLook into corpus callosum separation (split-brain) and some of the experiments that have been performed after this procedure. Fascinating displays of two separate consciousnesses. Sam Harris' Making Sense Podcast #234 had Iain McGilchrist to discuss this in some detail.
- ianhanschen 6y agoThat is what I am referring to :)
- sradman 6y agoSee Ian McGilchrist’s 2009 book The Master and His Emissary: > McGilchrist digests study after study, replacing the popular and superficial notion of the hemispheres as respectively logical and creative in nature with the idea that they pay attention in fundamentally different ways, the left being detail-oriented, the right being whole-oriented. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary
- judge2020 6y agoWithout listing the actual misconceptions some people have, it's hard to say 'the left brain/right brain divide' is a misconception since I was already aware of this understanding that they just observe in different ways, not that "left brain is creative and right is logical". I grew up with the internet, though, so my understanding didn't solely originate from grade school science books that might be simplifying this phenomenon.
- nullserver 6y agoI get minor strokes every couple of months. Each time I lose feeling in right side of body, and lose the ability to write. Not 100%, but close enough. Typing is fine however, if slow. Critical thinking goes to crap. Talking is fine. I can still draw, though my motivation goes to crap. Is weird what stays and what goes. Last time I looked writing is a left brain activity. Which controls right side.
- the__alchemist 6y agoI had the same reaction to parts. This in particular: > So why does the myth of a compartmentalized brain persist? One reason is that brain-scanning studies are expensive. As a compromise, typical studies include only enough scanning to show the strongest, most robust brain activity. These underpowered studies produce pretty pictures that appear to show little islands of activity in a calm-looking brain. But they miss plenty of other, less robust activity that may still be psychologically and biologically meaningful. In contrast, when studies are run with enough power, they show activity in the majority of the brain. Another, more relevant reason, is that brain-scanning studies are in their infancy.
- meepmorp 6y agoI don’t think your point is more relevant than theirs. It’s expensive to run brain scanning studies, so studies have smaller populations or lower resolution data collection in response. Yes, brain scanning studies are new, but we’ve been doing fMRI studies for nearly 3 decades and it’s still expensive. Had that cost been scaled back, we’d have more and/or better data because grants are (very) finite.
- Retric 6y agoThe issue here is the brain of test subjects aren’t simply doing exactly one thing at a time. Your ears don’t turn off because you’re doing a memory task in an MRI. As such it’s impossible to say what subset of brain activity is directly related to some activity rather than some related mental processes.
- jonnycomputer 6y agoThe brain is doing multiple things at once. But that doesn't mean its impossible to subset brain activity related to specific activities.
- jonnycomputer 6y agoI think I wasn't fair in this comment, because it suggests that it is easy to do, when it actually isn't. For example, a cogntive control task might have an easy and hard condition. You'll end up with significant activation all over the brain for either of them, and their contrast will still have significant differences between the conditions all over the place too (e.g. SMA, pSMA, Anterior Insula, Anterior Cingulate, Posterior Cingulate Cortex, visual and motor cortex, cerebellum, etc. etc. etc.). Because the brain is doing all kinds of things during the task, and any "subroutine" is still going to involve communication between lot of places. But if the idea that function isn't localized, i.e. going back to a naive connectionist paradigm, then, sorry, no. The distribution of activations we get are often quite stereotyped, and if we are more careful and specific with our models we can localize function often even better.
- anaphor 6y agoObviously you know this, but the brain does localize some functions to either hemisphere, just not in the way most people think it does. My vague memory from having taken a class in psycholinguistics is that people with aphasia who've had some part of their brain damaged are good evidence of this localization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area
- phkahler 6y agoYeah, and the amygdala has specific functions. Not that it's the only piece needed for that, or that it's not good for anything else. The evidence for more advanced brains in higher mammals is also plainly there. The author seems to be over-stating all this stuff in order to reject it.
- anaphor 6y agoAnd it's also the case that even though certain brain functions are linked with specific locations, the brain can still use plasticity to re-organize things and adapt to damage. And when you're doing any language related task, there are always going to be other more domain-general brain functions involved too, which aren't as localized.
- ramzyo 6y ago> However the author appears to be arguing from a position that they (or someone) actually know how the brain works Interesting that you had this takeaway, I didn’t get a sense of this at all. My takeaway was that the author presented modern findings (which constitute our present model for how the brain works, speaking nothing to a notion of some absolute correctness) to dispel older hypotheses that are disprovable based on the latest research. As presented, IMO, the author captures well that these modern findings are just a reference point against which to refute the stubborn tropes.
- dr_dshiv 6y agoLeft/right divide is a myth-myth. Check out "Master and His Emissary" for the enormous amount of evidence about left/right divide. The mirror neuron system is also a myth-myth. While there aren't "mirror neurons", per se (e.g., biochemically different), there is a system of mirroring and it is very important
- caddemon 6y agoI think there are a lot of myth-myths where basically the general public ran with a wildly pseudoscientific interpretation, and then the scientific community decides to dismiss the entire thing (at least outside of whatever subfield, although I've sometimes seen it within too). Speaking specifically to left vs right brain, in popular media I've mostly seen it presented as logic vs creativity, which completely disregards that people can be creative verbally, and that certain quantitative/technical things are very non-verbal.
- lycopodiopsida 6y agoHaving done a neuroscience degree myself, I would double on your conclusion — I still have no clue how a brain works, apart of some simpler systems, like visual pattern recognition. I am out of the field for a single-digit number of years already, but in retrospective it is hilarious how all the literature in neuroscience is gently moving around the question of «guys, bit how all of it works»? People are happy to hack on single neurons or do some fishy fMRI studies instead. But of course, our tooling today is not adequate for this task.
- hn_asker 6y agoYet somehow Pharma can prescribe drugs that affect the brain's functions. How do they get away with that knowing so little about the brain?
- vlunkr 6y agoThey give random drugs to rats until something happens.
- pvarangot 6y agoAnd then to humans
- devindotcom 6y agoPsychiatrists are doctors who prescribe substances that have been closely studied - but their effects may be easily and specifically understood, their mechanisms may not be. Lithium is a great example - very effective treatment for bipolar. No one really knows why. Prescribed for decades as they've tried to figure it out because tests showed it was effective and relatively safe, just no one knew exactly what it was doing in there. It's sort of how you can be a woodworker without knowing the cellular biology of trees, and without being an electrical or mechanical engineer who can build a table saw from scratch.
- adolph 6y ago
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoWhat surprised me most about the replication crisis was that neurology actually seemed to be more affected than psychology in how non-reproducible it was.
- tonystride 6y agoWhat about using the RB/LB as a metaphor for teaching? I feel like it helps me build a ladder of abstraction for certain concepts as a music teacher. Of course I add the disclaimer that this is not ACTUALLY how your brain works, but all that neuro-jargon isn't really helpful for understanding syncopation...