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Comment by notfed | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Also not a neurologist, but my reading of it was not the brain is "completely structureless" by any means. More that the 'structures' aren't clearly defined and, crucially, that the 'structures' don't act completely independently from the rest of the brain.

"Pretty much everything that your brain creates, from sights and sounds to memories and emotions, _involves your whole brain_."

They briefly mention that our notion of distinct brain structures may be influenced by our hyper-focus on certain areas of the brain, rather than wholistic study of the brain (because it's expensive).

As a kid, I certainly thought each portion of the brain was independent. As in, I believed that my motor functions came from the clearly distinct "motor function structure" of the brain and without that structure, I would have no motor function at all (and with no ability to regain motor function). I think that is the myth they are referring to.

I think what he's trying to say is that although the brain is divided, because consciousness is complex, most neurons are involved in most things?

Good conversation: Potential Functional Role for Minicolumns in Neocortex - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nEVO22IsVY

My feeling is that the "myth" they're trying to debunk is that there are rigid, "bright-line" separations between different brain regions, and that specifics regions are completely and uniquely responsible, for now and forevermore, for some specific "thing". Where the reality is that there is structure, but the lines are fuzzier, functionality overlaps, and neural plasticity allows for brain region to alter their function (to some extent) over time.

Yes, the mental image I got is a sort of Venn diagram of overlapping networks. In any sort of processing, more or less the whole brain is involved and one subset of the network isn't involved in only one thing, but possibly specialized for a few.

I suppose one should also account for a sort of neurological "noise floor" where noise means general background predictive activity. Your brain is always (trying to be) doing something all over, independent of sensory input, which becomes really apparent with the Ganzfeld experiment [1] without the bunk about "psi" and that esoteric BS.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_experiment

Agreed. Phrenology was the old hat idea, where names of folk psychology concepts were scrawled across areas of cortex.

The brain is specialised and differentiated.

However our concepts of what it does are being refined.

Instead of hunting for "the place where happiness lives", imposing ideas from culturally laden folk psychology onto the gelatinous mass... we are moving towards more fundamental notions of complex nervous system axioms. Like seeking, avoidance, arousal, mood, emotional valence, attention.

Brains are fun

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

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