Why we don't need a brain | Hacker News Reader

Why we don't need a brain

blog.ketyov.com

123 pointsks21 comments

I thought this was going to be a parody of all those 'you don't need' posts we see all the time, where someone goes off the rails about how some useful tool is totally unnecessary.

Instead, it's actually about the brain, how versatile it is, and ... Well, absolutely nothing about not needing one.

Yes, the title is complete linkbait.

Yes, this is a case where perhaps title editing would be beneficial. If a user sees the title on ketyov.com they won't be terribly misled. But on a link aggregation site like Hacker News, most people would assume as wccrawford did.

Heh. Damn right it's linkbait. My entire scientific outreach efforts are linkbait. Dude, I talk about zombie brains to the public.

Do you know how hard it is to get the most of the non-science public to care about science? If I can get people reading about the stuff that I find cool and mindblowing, and that makes them want to learn more on their own, then hell yeah I'm going for the linkbait title.

I'm not making money off this site. I don't give a damn about my SEO or bouncerate or whatever. I write this in my free time because I love the brain. And hopefully some of that accidentally rubs off on people.

Thank you! I read this thinking, "I wish more scientists would blog about their research like this!" Very approachable, very informative, and with citations! Astounding!

There are a lot of people that would love to read this sort of fascinating stuff, but don't have the technical understanding to read the papers you cite, for example. Those people are mostly stuck with the occasional Cracked article along the lines of "6 Insane Bugs You Didn't Know Existed", and Cracked has linkbait down to a science.

Oops, forgot to respond to this! You're welcome. Don't get me wrong, Cracked can be very good for spurring on interest as well, but sometimes it's good to have references. :)

This is astounding! I would have never predicted that people's brains could regenerate at such a late stage or undergo such rearrangement without loss of function. It yields light on an implicit assumption of mine—which seems almost as outdated as phrenology now—that even if the structure of the brain is not so localized as we might want it to be, a large amount of gross structure is needed for normal cognitive function.

Instead, plasticity wins out again? The brain will proceed to function given stimulation and time despite pretty grave odds.

I am not sure that any other animal has evolved to have it's skull and brain squished hard during birth, like we have. This is why chimps outsmart human children for the first years of life. We do indeed have a very unusually plastic brain.

That is interesting. I don't think that you can say that the cause is our brain being squished during birth. I think the child lags behind at first because it has to do deeper learning and hence it takes more time. i.e. The brain is learning a lot more patterns, and patterns within patterns, than the chimp. Remember that a baby is also learning to speak. The child just has a lot more brain cells it needs to train. Although, a child at one year will already understand a lot of what you say, not sure about the chimp.

This article is upside down. The title is the last line in the article: How much brain is really necessary?

The author should rewrite it as a Crab Canon.

Flagged for the title.

Suggested new title: "How much of the brain is really necessary?"

Good idea. I was wondering if I should have changed the title, but it's too late now. Btw, the author of this article is not me, so I didn't gain anything by it.

Plasticity and neuron interconnects seem to be keys here. Regions like the corpus callosum are immensely interesting. I am curious if we could some how manipulate animal cells to generate more of these fibers, with a better distribution and observe the level of intelligence animals exhibit.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fluid_and_cry...

Incidentally, while the cerebrum -- the big, wrinkled top part -- is the largest part of the brain, and the most well-studied, it actually only contains a minority of neurons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron#Neurons_in_the_brain

The cerebrum has ~16.3 billion neurons, whereas the cerebellum has ~69 billion.

Also, while people missing large parts of their brain can seem to do okay, the traumatic loss of even a small part of the brain can do severe damage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area

That's only counterintuitive if you consider density of neurons to be the most important factor for capacity. I'd be well surprised if the cerebrum continues to be outranked in things like dendritic and/or synaptic density.

It's exactly this discrepancy that I find so fascinating! It's what I spent my PhD on :)

I believe that the two major players here are plasticity and connectivity. If you lose a critical hub in the network, you're going to be much worse off than if you lose a loosely connected, plastic region.

That's the point of these two papers: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20921401 <- free open access http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21040843 <- lame closed

Conversely, why do most people with a full brain exhibit so many signs that they have none?

A larger volume of code raises the probability of more bugs.

Yes, thank you; humor, that was intended. But thanks for all the downvotes :)

I think this answers the questions we all have about politicians.

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