Ben Carsons Gray Matter

[elleng]

'I need Ben Carson in my head.

In my hippocampus, to be exact.

According to Carson, the human brain stores a perfect, indelible record of everything that it has seen, heard and done, and if he just drilled a hole through my skull and planted electrodes in the right region, bingo! I’d have access to the whole wondrous trove.

Drill, baby, drill. I need the access. As things stand now, I lose 45 minutes every week to the retrieval of forgotten passwords, and I recently got three-quarters of the way through a mystery before realizing that I knew whodunit, how he dun it and why he dun it. I’d already read the book.

Carson, our brand-new housing secretary, made an introductory, supposedly inspirational speech to federal employees this week, and while this kind of thing normally doesn’t wind up in the news, there’s nothing normal about Carson.

During the speech, he went on the tangent about the brain that I just described, and while, granted, he’s a renowned neurosurgeon and I’m an expert on little more than semicolons, I do question his assertion that with proper cerebral stimulation, someone can “recite back to you verbatim a book they read 60 years ago.” Maybe “Green Eggs and Ham.” But “The Mill on the Floss”?'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/opinion/ben-carsons-gray-matter.html?

Too good not to share!

[Nitram]

1. Carson didn't originate the theory that all our memories are permanently stored in the brain.

It's been around for a long time. The problem has always been how to access such memories. The theory originated, I believe, with early experiments during brain surgery where random parts of the exposed brain were electrically stimulated to map brain function (general anesthesia is not administered for open brain surgery). Sometimes a toe would twitch, sometimes the memory of a specific occasion would be revived in total and utter clarity of detail including sights, sounds and smells.