People think that the brain is like a micromanager dealing with all parts of the body manually, but it seems like various levels of 'intelligence' in our body is very much decentralised.
Not asking sarcastically, just curious when schools started moving forwards with these things. The decentralised nature of thinking is something that's only been presented to me with a biological basis in the past few years. Would love to know who was agead of the curve, how so, and why!
Now whether the spinal cord actually can learn motor skills seems to be a bit of an open question, but it can perform some instinctive tasks like shying away from painful stimuli.
There’s a book, The Talent Code. One of the central premises is neuroplasticity and more precisely the process of muslin “wrapping” certain neuropathways making them more efficient.
This happens all the time - for connections deemed by the brain as important. While demoting “unimportant” ones.
So yes, the brain undergoes constant change - iterating on continuous improvement.
Intentional practice activates this process.
This, what we call “talent”, more often than not, is the result of intentional practice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Brown%27s_Super_Book_o...
It wasn't named, but it was presented as "if you accidentally touched a hot stove, your reflexes would move your hand before you felt the pain because the round trip to your spine is a shorter path." Which thinking about it now, doesn't quite make sense as an explanation because one is a round trip and the other is not, but oh well. There was an accompanying picture showing a round trip to the base of the skull/top of the spine (not the middle of the spine like the picture in wikipedia).
I did not learn about this in school, but it was apparently accepted enough to put into a children's "encyclopedia".
It doesn't add any explanatory power and confuses rather than clarifies. Why not nest humunculae infinitely? No, the brain at all steps, processes information.