Myths about the brain

> [Myth 1] specific parts of the human brain have specific psychological jobs ... [Rebuttal] Neurons in a brain region called the anterior cingulate cortex are regularly involved in memory, emotion, decision-making, pain, moral judgments, imagination, attention, and empathy.

This is not a rebuttal to the myth. Imagine I'm talking about a car, and I say: It's a myth that specific parts of the car have specific functions. For example, the engine is involved in starting the car, accelerating the car, decelerating the car, regulating the car's speed, producing heat for the cabin, and running the alternator to produce electricity for the lights, power systems, and radio! That's so many things! But of course the engine has one dedicated, primary function, and the others are either downstream functions or side benefits. The anterior cingulate cortex is clearly not as specialized as a car engine, but it is highly specialized; it's just that its specialized function is not so easy to describe (or even discern) in words like "memory", "emotion", etc. Each of those words describes a huge group of functions that are downstream of the function of the anterior cingulate cortex and many other specialized structures.

I believe the "specialized brain regions" idea has been over-debunked. It was the source of so much woo woo in the late 20th century (are you right-brained or left-brained!?) that we've come to think it's complete bunk. But we have a huge body of evidence showing that there is a big difference in how the left vs. right brain processes information and that different brain regions are highly specialized, but that their specialized functions don't map cleanly into the language we were already describing human behavior with.

The books of William Uttal cover the issues of localization and neurological modeling at different levels of detail. The most popular I think is The New Phrenology[1] and the most technical is Mind and Brain[2]. A quote from the latter:

To sum up, the new metaphor proposed here asserts that it seems more likely in the light of current research that there are no demarcatable regions nor any regions of predetermined and fixed cognitive functionality in the brain; there are, rather, just "softly" bounded areas that may shrink, enlarge, or be recruited as the current task demands. Furthermore, none of these weakly bounded regions has any specific, preassigned, or fixed function. They all serve as general-purpose processing entities as required by whatever cognitive task is being processed. The whole notion of a place on the brain having a specific identifiable purpose has to be abandoned as an unreliable and outmoded metaphor.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/New-Phrenology-Localizing-Philosophic...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Brain-Appraisal-Cognitive-Neuros...

This article bothers me a little bit. It makes it sound like the brain is completely structureless, and that the division of brain into "parts" is a myth.

I'm not a neurologist but this seems a disingenuous. Surely we know that the limbic system serves a major role in emotions. We know that the hippocampus serves a major role in long term memory formation. The amygdala controls the fear response. Plenty of other examples.

But this article is very high level so maybe I'm completely misunderstanding what "myth" they're trying to debunk.

> The third myth is that there’s a clear dividing line between diseases of the body, such as cardiovascular disease, and diseases of the mind, such as depression.

"The Widowmaker", the 15th episode of "Circle of Willis", also touches this topic, where heartache and uneasiness may, and often do, kill: http://circleofwillispodcast.com/episode/3c339c578a884870/th...

I love articles like this. But I have NO facility or background to evaluate them. Given their premise is "everything you've been told is wrong", how do I know that this one is right? :-/

I just finished Blindsight, which is a SciFi novel but written by PhD Biologist and highly respected in Neurological circles... which pretty much commits to every.single.one. of these 'myths'.

Note, this is not an issue of "it's a young empirical discipline with a lot of uncertainty" (though that is the case as well:). For things which we should be able to discern some basic patterns and models, there seems to be tremendous amount of disagreement in seemingly-authoritative and knowledgeable sources; which just allows so much Woo-Hoo of the world to arise (and I'm not just thinking of Deepak Chopra:).

I think this article focuses on too much on some nuances of neuroscience, that in the end it becomes misleading. I guess a similar example would be making a statement like, all programming languages are equally useful since they are all Turing complete. It has some basis of truth, but is very misleading as in the real world, Javascript and QBasic are used in radically different ways.

Though I no longer am practicing neurosurgery, I did do 6 years of training in neurosurgery and probably treated thousands of patients with various brain issues.

So let me give my perspective on the first myth, and if I have time may address some of the other ones as well.

> Myth number one is that specific parts of the human brain have specific psychological jobs.

What is true is that specific parts of the brain have very specific physiological jobs. Psychological function is likely complex enough that multiple parts of the brain are involved, but there are areas when affected, that can have certain psychological effects. Let me give a couple of cases that illustrate both the physiological and psychological aspects.

For the physiological case, we had a patient that had seizures that could not be treated with medicine, and required some of the brain tissue to be removed. Unfortunately, the area was very close to the speech areas of the brain. What we ended up doing is putting the patient to sleep, opening up the skull and brain covering (dura), and then waking the patient back up. Neuropsychologists tested the patient's ability to name things and speak as we zapped small areas of the brain with electrodes. When we hit a critical area, the patient's speech stopped instantly. Doing this, we were able to map the speech areas with millimeter accuracy so we could safely do the surgery.

In terms of psychological function, it is know that the front part of the brain is involved in impulse control. I saw an older patient with his family who had a large tumor there. I asked them if he had done anything impulsive recently. They had surprised looks on their faces as they said, "How did you know?" and then related how the man, who had been a very upstanding person all his life, had done something that had gotten him arrested.

So I would say, for the general non-specialist, the idea that brains have specific parts that do specific things is probably less of a myth than some notion of all parts of the brain doing everything/most things.

A computer analogy to what the article is doing would be like saying that because there is no one specific part of a computer that is responsible for playing Youtube videos (the CPU, GPU, Memory, SSD, PCI system would all be involved) it is myth that computers have specialized parts.

Of course there is localization of function in the brain. Just because you see a lot of raw activity in the brain at any one time doesn't contradict that: the brain is doing lots of things at the same time too. But more importantly, more than one function may be necessary to achieve any particular behavior. Think of all that has to go on to type a message in a forum like this. Motor control of the fingers, memory of key-letter mappings, language, syntax, vocabulary, and organization of thought. Sure, typing a message in a web forum doesn't have a specific localization in the brain, but we wouldn't exactly expect that would we. Instead, we have functions to differentiate, associate, evaluate, to localize, generalize, infer, predict. The mechanics of reinforcement learning, for example, are predictably localized in specific brain regions in the caudate.

I think articles like this do more harm than good. The brain is not an undifferentiated connectionist network.

I agree with the other comments in here: this article takes several complex, long-running debates (modularity vs connectionism, predictive vs feedforward processing, dualism/monism) and reduces them to simplistic flamebait answers that come down definitively on one side. It's really the worst kind of popular science writing, because it's overconfident and dismissive of the opposing view rather then separating the debate out into appropriate parts that can be tackled with evidence-based research.

I regret that we have grown to call things like this myths. Seems many are then dismissed as false, without retaining any sense of usefulness they may or may not have.

Instead, simplifications and the limits of their explanation would be a much greater framing for some things.

"Today, we know the brain isn’t divided into puzzle pieces with dedicated psychological functions. Instead, the human brain is a massive network of neurons."

Wow. Speechless. Maybe it's Broca's aphasia?

It's a sad day when nautil.us is publishing stuff like this. Sigh.

Well, the first myth is a complete surprise to me, especially the bit about the lizard brain. I've parroted about it in casual conversation for decades now.

> Most neurons have multiple jobs, not a single psychological purpose. For example, neurons in a brain region called the anterior cingulate cortex are regularly involved in memory, emotion, decision-making, pain, moral judgments, imagination, attention, and empathy.

One possible answer here is that these things (e.g., memory, emotion, decision-making, and pain) actually have more in common than we perceive. It's possible that mental states that seem very different to us (from "inside" our brains) are in fact quite similar (from "outside" the brain), or vice versa. The lesson may really just be that our own introspection is an unreliable guide to the actual structure of the mind.

For those wondering/asserting if the author is an expert in neuroscience, she is actually a psychologist by training.

I'm personally very skeptical about anything psychologists say. I would not take any of this by face value without validating them against real neuroscience research or consulting neuroscientists. Psychologists love to say stuff helter-skelter and make them sound like real science.

[https://www.affective-science.org/lisa-feldman-barrett.shtml]

Overstated argument to tell a story. Their creative writing tutor should be asked for a refund. This is one of those half-right statements: the regionalism of brain function is Overstated? Yes. There is no locality to specific tasks? No, that's overstated itself. We know loss of prefrontal cortex has different effects to loss of other regions. What's disputed is the specificity and singularity of the regions. Some functions can be reacquired despite loss of a region. Some functions are more diffuse.

> Scientists have believed for a long time that severe damage to the visual cortex in the left side of your brain will leave you unable to see out of your right eye, assuming that the ability to see out of one eye is largely due to the visual cortex on the opposite side. Yet more than 50 years ago, studies on cats with cortical blindness on one side showed that it is possible to restore some of the lost sight by cutting a connection deep in the cat’s midbrain. A bit more damage allowed the cats to orient toward and approach moving objects.

I've presented on blindsight before, the phenomenon where a person cannot describe or draw items that are presented in one side of their visual field, due to trauma to their primary visual cortex (V1), but they can still guess what these items are above chance level, direct their gaze to them, reach for them and so on. The superior colliculus seems to play a large role in this, and there are also visual projections that bypass V1, which could be partly responsible for the phenomenon. But this tidbit about "cutting a connection deep in the cat's midbrain" is new to me. Does this ring a bell for anyone?

No citations are provided for the myth of triune brain. Too bad. What’s with the cerebellum? That never fit, anyway.

“It continues to hold public interest because of its simplicity. While inaccurate in many respects as an explanation for brain activity, structure and evolution, it remains one of very few approximations of the truth we have to work with: the "neocortex" represents that cluster of brain structures involved in advanced cognition, including planning, modeling and simulation; the "limbic brain" refers to those brain structures, wherever located, associated with social and nurturing behaviors, mutual reciprocity, and other behaviors and affects that arose during the age of the mammals; and the "reptilian brain" refers to those brain structures related to territoriality, ritual behavior and other "reptile" behaviors.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain

> Scientists have believed for a long time that severe damage to the visual cortex in the left side of your brain will leave you unable to see out of your right eye, assuming that the ability to see out of one eye is largely due to the visual cortex on the opposite side.

IIRC it’s well known that the left hemisphere processes visual stimuli from the right field of view of both eyes…

There are many more crazy things regarding the brain. Man living with 5% of the brain: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-... . One case IQ 75, but another case IQ 176 and degree in Mathematics.

Supposedly hippocampus stores memories, but people with operated hippocampus still keep their memories? Psychodelic or meditative states being associated with significant reduction of all brain activity, what conflicts with the subjective experience.

Now, for example there are 12 medical cases described where blind people approaching death regained left their body and described visual information in the operating room, what was corroborated by impartial skeptic medical professionals: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Mindsight:+N... . There is very sizable amount of evidence that something is going on in conciousness than just purely material. Read this article before you make the final judgement: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172100/ . I am not implying any magic - maybe quantum computations like in Penrose/Hammerhof theory? Maybe material world is an "icon" of more complex reality underneath like in Donald Hoffman's model?

I'm looking for a scientific discussion here, not just "someone who thinks that materialism is not all that describes reality is surely crazy".

I was surprised that the ‘you only use x% of your brain’ canard was not discussed.

Whenever I read articles like this I feel the field is about 150 years behind other sciences. What I fail to grasp is whether they are marooned at this point, will always lag a distance, or rapidly advance. I hope it’s the latter but I read little evidence.

It's funny, some argued 'myths' were a tool of the brain to explain the world and are one side of a spectrum with rationality the other, but they still linger in every thought.

"Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology."

Adorno, T. W., and Max Horkheimer. [1947] 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Rational thought in western philosophy is closely related to 'Gnothi seauton'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself

With science, as the foremost form of rationality today, of the opinion, the 'self' residing in the brain. Which may be an albeit practical myth of the brain to explain itself to itself.

I'm surprised to learn the third myth is even a myth. My thoughts and feelings change significantly when I switch from sitting to walking/running or move from an indoor room to sitting outside in the sun. When I go from being in shape to out of shape my brain feels much more lethargic. I could go on but the general point is that changes in my physical condition have a big impact on my mental processes and vice versa.

I had thought these responses were normal and the body and brain are deeply linked to each other. Do most people not feel these same effects?

Feldman's book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is fantastic. Succinct, myth-busting, and very readable.

Fieldman Barrett's book, "How Emotions are Made" is really, really interesting and goes into way more detail about the subjects she mentions here and others.

She backs up all of what she writes, as well: a good 20% of the book is simply footnotes.

Of course you don’t have depression because your wife hates your mother, you’re stuck in a job you don’t like to keep paying the mortgage and you have to live with two moody teenagers. It’s all in your metabolism. Here, have a pill to fix it.

Took a good few seconds to load what is essentially a few paragraphs of text and an image. How can people accept 21mb websites? Perhaps they're just eager to play their part in global warming.

The product manager in me squealed at this part:

"Predicting and correcting is a more efficient way to run a system than constantly reacting in an uncertain world."

I'm no expert, but this article seems misleading in several ways.

>Myth number one is that specific parts of the human brain have specific psychological jobs.

Your brain is both very compartmentalized and generalized. The neocortex contains many discrete regions with very specialized neural architectures for specific tasks. The visual cortex and Broca's Area have specific and very different psychological jobs. No one's Broca's Area does edge detection on signals coming from the optic nerve, and no one's V1 is contributing to their manner of speech. The cerebellum does one thing, the olivary complexes another, etc.

Of course there is a huge amount of uncertainty as to what various areas do and how they communicate - the brain is an amazingly plastic network and as the author points out it can reorganize and repurpose quickly, but there are certainly specialized areas like "puzzle pieces," just with somewhat fuzzy borders to them. The "triune brain" is

>Myth number two is that your brain reacts to events in the world... All your neurons are firing at various rates all the time.

I don't understand this. Of course your brain reacts to events in the world. That is what it is for, to interpret events in the world and issue instructions to respond to them. It is true that for example the reading portions of your brain are not "off" until you open a book, but it's clear that neuronal activity and blood flow increases to these areas when a person is engaged in the corresponding activity. So it is not a matter of off and on, but rather idle and under load.

Prediction is part of this process as well, but it doesn't mean that the brain does not respond in a macro or micro way to stimuli.

>The third myth is that there’s a clear dividing line between diseases of the body, such as cardiovascular disease, and diseases of the mind, such as depression.

I can see how this might be confusing, but I don't think many people take Cartesian Dualism this literally. Maybe I'm wrong. People I think generally understand that the brain is an organ, part of the body and different from individual to individual.

But what you treat with a serotonin reuptake inhibitor or antipsychotic is different from what you treat with therapy. One is a treatment for the brain, the organ, the other is a treatment for the mind, the abstract concept we have for the sum of our learned experiences. These are certainly different things.

I would not go blindly repeating the things this article claims. It is mischaracterizing both the myths and the truth, in my (amateur) opinion.