TED Talks Michael Merzenich: Exploring the re-wiring of the brain

[n2doc]

At link:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/michael_merzenich_on_the_elastic_brain.html

[Posteritatis]

1. Damn you, now I'm going to spend all afternoon on that site (nt)

[Warpy]

3. It's a great way to kill an afternoon

Don't miss Bittman's lecture on food and the lecture on deep sea life.

[Nihil]

4. Agreed.

Whilst I love some of the techo-geek stuff, my favourite is
the deep sea stuff.
:wow:

[Dogmudgeon]

2. My Gripe

The metaphor of brain "wiring" -- whether "hardwiring" or "rewiring" or plain-old "wiring" -- REALLY chaps my amygdala.

The brain does NOT act like a machine AT ALL. In fact, if we were looking for a better metaphor, a village or a city would be a good start.

I actually have a little expertise in this. I worked in neurology in many capacities, for several years. Ran tests. Wrote software. Edited journal submissions. Kissed physicians' fannies. Did NIH/JCAHO compliance work.

I don't know why neuroscientists continue to use the metaphor. Like all metaphors, it limits the ability to think creatively about problem-solving. I am sure that several perfectly obvious discoveries have been overlooked because scientists were looking for "wires" rather than agents, citizens, waves of grain, chocolate-covered tasers, furniture with the power of speech, or four-dimensional sex toys.

Then, as a matching folly, we have pop chemical reductionism. So pleasure is now called "endorphines", arrogance is now called "testosterone", psychological energy is "adrenalin", and so on. Well, these aren't right, either. There's a whole set of endorphines that cause pain and fever and signal cytokinins. Low testosterone is MUCH more likely to trigger assholish behavior. And high adrenalin output happens during a "crash" as the adrenal cortex pumps the stuff out in a futile effort to keep up.

Okay. That's my rant. Everybody, back to work on that cure for Cancer.

--d!

[Warpy]

5. They continue to use the metaphor because it's an apt one

for what's going on within the brain.

The "rewiring" is actually the growth of dendrites to make new connections among neurons. It's how we can reteach things like language and motion to brain injured patients, by patterning movement and speech and encouraging the dendrites to grow where we need them to in order to restore function to a patient. It's basically why intensive rehab works.

It's truly amazing to watch a paralyzed head injured patient arrive on a ventilator and see him walking and talking a year later.

FWIW, I was the RN liaison with the head injury research group in a VA hospital.

I do agree, however, about the misuse of chemistry as a substitute for emotion. It suggests that we're out of control and that there's nothing we can do to moderate our behavior, it's all chemical.

It's not.