A single brain area makes humans unique?

10 Replies to “A single brain area makes humans unique?”

1. 1
   bornagain77 says:

   July 24, 2015 at 6:59 pm

   As to:

   “Other studies that compare monkeys and humans have revealed differences in the brain’s anatomy, for example, but not differences that could explain where humans’ abstract abilities come from, say neuroscientists.
   “This gives us a powerful clue about what is special about our minds,” says psychologist Gary Marcus at New York University. “Nothing is more important than understanding how we got to be how we are.”

   “how we got to be how we are”, especially how our brain got to be the way it is, has nothing whatsoever to do with unguided material processes.

   Human brain has more switches than all computers on Earth – November 2010
   Excerpt: They found that the brain’s complexity is beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief, says Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and senior author of the paper describing the study: …One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor–with both memory-storage and information-processing elements–than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.
   http://news.cnet.com/8301-2708.....2-247.html

   The Half-Truths of Materialist Evolution – DONALD DeMARCO – 02/06/2015
   Excerpt: but I would like to direct attention to the unsupportable notion that the human brain, to focus on a single phenomenon, could possibly have evolved by sheer chance. One of the great stumbling blocks for Darwin and other chance evolutionists is explaining how a multitude of factors simultaneously coalesce to form a unified, functioning system. The human brain could not have evolved as a result of the addition of one factor at a time. Its unity and phantasmagorical complexity defies any explanation that relies on pure chance. It would be an underestimation of the first magnitude to say that today’s neurophysiologists know more about the structure and workings of the brain than did Darwin and his associates.
   Scientists in the field of brain research now inform us that a single human brain contains more molecular-scale switches than all the computers, routers and Internet connections on the entire planet! According to Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the brain’s complexity is staggering, beyond anything his team of researchers had ever imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief. In the cerebral cortex alone, each neuron has between 1,000 to 10,000 synapses that result, roughly, in a total of 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies!
   A single synapse may contain 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A synapse, simply stated, is the place where a nerve impulse passes from one nerve cell to another.
   Phantasmagorical as this level of unified complexity is, it places us merely at the doorway of the brain’s even deeper mind-boggling organization. Glial cells in the brain assist in neuron speed. These cells outnumber neurons 10 times over, with 860 billion cells. All of this activity is monitored by microglia cells that not only clean up damaged cells but also prune dendrites, forming part of the learning process. The cortex alone contains 100,000 miles of myelin-covered, insulated nerve fibers.
   The process of mapping the brain would indeed be time-consuming. It would entail identifying every synaptic neuron. If it took a mere second to identify each neuron, it would require four billion years to complete the project.
   http://www.ncregister.com/dail.....evolution/

   Component placement optimization in the brain – 1994
   As he comments [106], “To current limits of accuracy … the actual placement appears to be the best of all possible layouts; this constitutes strong evidence of perfect optimization.,, among about 40,000,000 alternative layout orderings, the actual ganglion placement in fact requires the least total connection length.
   http://www.jneurosci.org/conte.....8.abstract

   NIH Director: Each Neuron is Different – July 11, 2015
   Excerpt: Things are astronomically more complicated in the brain, as its “wires” are not merely a conduit of electrical charge but an incredibly complex cell called a neuron. And each neuron does not merely attach to two distant connectors, but rather to hundreds or thousands of connectors. And each connection is nothing like a simple soldering attachment. In the brain they are called synapses and with thousands of molecular-scale switches researchers compare them to microprocessors.
   But on top of all that, each neuron is different. A hundred billion different, unique neurons, each having a different, unique function. Each forming a different, unique set of synapses. We have not even begun to understand all of this neural circuitry, let alone how to design or build anything like it. And yet (Darwinists) insist it all must have arisen spontaneously, as a result of random mutations. That is not science, that is absurdity.
   http://darwins-god.blogspot.co.....erent.html

   “Complexity Brake” Defies Evolution – August 8, 2012
   Excerpt: Consider a neuronal synapse — the presynaptic terminal has an estimated 1000 distinct proteins. Fully analyzing their possible interactions would take about 2000 years. Or consider the task of fully characterizing the visual cortex of the mouse — about 2 million neurons. Under the extreme assumption that the neurons in these systems can all interact with each other, analyzing the various combinations will take about 10 million years…, even though it is assumed that the underlying technology speeds up by an order of magnitude each year.
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....62961.html

   The Puzzling Role Of Biophotons In The Brain – Dec. 17, 2010
   Excerpt: In recent years, a growing body of evidence shows that photons play an important role in the basic functioning of cells. Most of this evidence comes from turning the lights off and counting the number of photons that cells produce. It turns out, much to many people’s surprise, that many cells, perhaps even most, emit light as they work.
   In fact, it looks very much as if many cells use light to communicate. There’s certainly evidence that bacteria, plants and even kidney cells communicate in this way. Various groups have even shown that rats brains are literally alight thanks to the photons produced by neurons as they work.,,,
   ,,, earlier this year, one group showed that spinal neurons in rats can actually conduct light.
   ,, Rahnama and co point out that neurons contain many light sensitive molecules, such as porphyrin rings, flavinic, pyridinic rings, lipid chromophores and aromatic amino acids. In particular, mitochondria, the machines inside cells which produce energy, contain several prominent chromophores.
   The presence of light sensitive molecules makes it hard to imagine how they might not be not influenced by biophotons.,,,
   They go on to suggest that the light channelled by microtubules can help to co-ordinate activities in different parts of the brain. It’s certainly true that electrical activity in the brain is synchronised over distances that cannot be easily explained. Electrical signals travel too slowly to do this job, so something else must be at work.,,,
   (So) It’s a big jump to assume that photons do this job.
   http://www.technologyreview.co.....the-brain/

   Of related note to “It’s certainly true that electrical activity in the brain is synchronised over distances that cannot be easily explained”, the following video and paper comments on ‘zero time lag’ in synchronous brain activity:

   Quantum Entangled Consciousness – Life After Death – Stuart Hameroff – video (1:58 minute mark)
   https://youtu.be/jjpEc98o_Oo?t=117

   ,,, zero time lag neuronal synchrony despite long conduction delays – 2008
   Excerpt: Multielectrode recordings have revealed zero time lag synchronization among remote cerebral cortical areas. However, the axonal conduction delays among such distant regions can amount to several tens of milliseconds. It is still unclear which mechanism is giving rise to isochronous discharge of widely distributed neurons, despite such latencies,,,
   Remarkably, synchrony of neuronal activity is not limited to short-range interactions within a cortical patch. Interareal synchronization across cortical regions including interhemispheric areas has been observed in several tasks (7, 9, 11–14).,,,
   Beyond its functional relevance, the zero time lag synchrony among such distant neuronal ensembles must be established by mechanisms that are able to compensate for the delays involved in the neuronal communication. Latencies in conducting nerve impulses down axonal processes can amount to delays of several tens of milliseconds between the generation of a spike in a presynaptic cell and the elicitation of a postsynaptic potential (16). The question is how, despite such temporal delays, the reciprocal interactions between two brain regions can lead to the associated neural populations to fire in unison (i.e. zero time lag).,,,
   http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....MC2575223/

   The following paper appeals to a ‘non-local’, (i.e. beyond space and time), cause to try to explain the zero lag synchronization in neural circuits,,,

   Nonlocal mechanism for cluster synchronization in neural circuits – 2011
   Excerpt: The findings,,, call for reexamining sources of correlated activity in cortex,,,
   http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.3634
2. 2
   bornagain77 says:

   July 24, 2015 at 7:01 pm

   further notes: If the mind of a person were merely the brain, as materialists hold, then if half of a brain were removed then a ‘person’ should only be ‘half the person’, or at least somewhat less of a ‘person’, as they were before, but that is not the case. The ‘whole person’ stays intact even though the brain suffers severe impairment:

   Miracle Of Mind-Brain Recovery Following Hemispherectomies – Dr. Ben Carson – video
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zBrY77mBNg

   Removing Half of Brain Improves Young Epileptics’ Lives: – 1997
   Excerpt: “We are awed by the apparent retention of memory and by the retention of the child’s personality and sense of humor,” Dr. Eileen P. G. Vining,,
   Dr. John Freeman, the director of the Johns Hopkins Pediatric Epilepsy Center, said he was dumbfounded at the ability of children to regain speech after losing the half of the brain that is supposedly central to language processing.
   ”It’s fascinating,” Dr. Freeman said. ”The classic lore is that you can’t change language after the age of 2 or 3.”
   But Dr. Freeman’s group has now removed diseased left hemispheres in more than 20 patients, including three 13-year-olds whose ability to speak transferred to the right side of the brain in much the way that Alex’s did.,,,
   http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08.....lives.html

   In further comment from the neuro-surgeons in the John Hopkins study:

   “Despite removal of one hemisphere, the intellect of all but one of the children seems either unchanged or improved. Intellect was only affected in the one child who had remained in a coma, vigil-like state, attributable to peri-operative complications.”

   Strange but True: When Half a Brain Is Better than a Whole One – May 2007
   Excerpt: Most Hopkins hemispherectomy patients are five to 10 years old. Neurosurgeons have performed the operation on children as young as three months old. Astonishingly, memory and personality develop normally. ,,,
   Another study found that children that underwent hemispherectomies often improved academically once their seizures stopped. “One was champion bowler of her class, one was chess champion of his state, and others are in college doing very nicely,” Freeman says.
   Of course, the operation has its downside: “You can walk, run—some dance or skip—but you lose use of the hand opposite of the hemisphere that was removed. You have little function in that arm and vision on that side is lost,” Freeman says. Remarkably, few other impacts are seen. ,,,
   http://www.scientificamerican......r-than-who

   Self-awareness in humans is more complex, diffuse than previously thought – August 22, 2012
   Excerpt: Self-awareness is defined as being aware of oneself, including one’s traits, feelings, and behaviors. Neuroscientists have believed that three brain regions are critical for self-awareness: the insular cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the medial prefrontal cortex. However, a research team led by the University of Iowa has challenged this theory by showing that self-awareness is more a product of a diffuse patchwork of pathways in the brain – including other regions – rather than confined to specific areas. The conclusions came from a rare opportunity to study a person with extensive brain damage to the three regions believed critical for self-awareness. The person, a 57-year-old, college-educated man known as “Patient R,” passed all standard tests of self-awareness. He also displayed repeated self-recognition, both when looking in the mirror and when identifying himself in unaltered photographs taken during all periods of his life. “What this research clearly shows is that self-awareness corresponds to a brain process that cannot be localized to a single region of the brain,”,,,
   http://medicalxpress.com/news/.....ously.html

   As to our unique linguistic/mathematical ability

   Young Children Have Grammar and Chimpanzees Don’t – Apr. 10, 2013
   Excerpt: “When you compare what children should say if they follow grammar against what children do say, you find it to almost indistinguishable,” Yang said. “If you simulate the expected diversity when a child is only repeating what adults say, it produces a diversity much lower than what children actually say.”
   As a comparison, Yang applied the same predictive models to the set of Nim Chimpsky’s signed phrases, the only data set of spontaneous animal language usage publicly available. He found further evidence for what many scientists, including Nim’s own trainers, have contended about Nim: that the sequences of signs Nim put together did not follow from rules like those in human language.
   Nim’s signs show significantly lower diversity than what is expected under a systematic grammar and were similar to the level expected with memorization. This suggests that true language learning is — so far — a uniquely human trait, and that it is present very early in development.
   “The idea that children are only imitating adults’ language is very intuitive, so it’s seen a revival over the last few years,” Yang said. “But this is strong statistical evidence in favor of the idea that children actually know a lot about abstract grammar from an early age.”
   http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....131327.htm

   Language study offers new twist on mind-body connection – Feb. 2, 2014
   Excerpt: The results show that speech perception automatically engages the articulatory motor system, but linguistic preferences persist even when the language motor system is disrupted. These findings suggest that, despite their intimate links, the language and motor systems are distinct.
   “Language is designed to optimize motor action, but its knowledge consists of principles that are disembodied and potentially abstract,” the researchers concluded.
   http://medicalxpress.com/news/.....-body.html

   Adventures in Experimenting On Toddlers By Alison Gopnik Dec. 13, 2013
   Excerpt: But this simple problem actually requires some very abstract thinking. It’s not that any particular block makes the machine go. It’s the fact that the blocks are the same rather than different. Other animals have a very hard time understanding this. Chimpanzees can get hundreds of examples and still not get it, even with delicious bananas as a reward.
   The conventional wisdom has been that young children also can’t learn this kind of abstract logical principle. Scientists like Jean Piaget believed that young children’s thinking was concrete and superficial. And in earlier studies, preschoolers couldn’t solve this sort of “same/different” problem.
   But in those studies, researchers asked children to say what they thought about pictures of objects. Children often look much smarter when you watch what they do instead of relying on what they say.
   We did the experiment I just described with 18-to-24-month-olds. And they got it right, with just two examples. The secret was showing them real blocks on a real machine and asking them to use the blocks to make the machine go.,,,
   Now we are looking at another weird result. Although the 4-year-olds did well on the easier sequential task, in a study we’re still working on, they actually seem to be doing worse than the babies on the harder simultaneous one. So there’s a new problem for us to solve.
   http://online.wsj.com/news/art.....3386009168

   Geometric Principles Appear Universal in Our Minds – May 2011
   Excerpt: Villagers belonging to an Amazonian group called the Mundurucú intuitively grasp abstract geometric principles despite having no formal math education,,, Mundurucú adults and 7- to 13-year-olds demonstrate as firm an understanding of the properties of points, lines and surfaces as adults and school-age children in the United States and France,,,
   http://www.wired.com/wiredscie.....-geometry/

   Design Thinking Is Hardwired in the Human Brain. How Come? – October 17, 2012
   Excerpt: “Even Professional Scientists Are Compelled to See Purpose in Nature, Psychologists Find.” The article describes a test by Boston University’s psychology department, in which researchers found that “despite years of scientific training, even professional chemists, geologists, and physicists from major universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Yale cannot escape a deep-seated belief that natural phenomena exist for a purpose” ,,,
   Most interesting, though, are the questions begged by this research. One is whether it is even possible to purge teleology from explanation.
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....65381.html
3. 3
   bornagain77 says:

   July 24, 2015 at 7:01 pm

   Evolution of the Genus Homo – Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences – Ian Tattersall, Jeffrey H. Schwartz, May 2009
   Excerpt: “Unusual though Homo sapiens may be morphologically, it is undoubtedly our remarkable cognitive qualities that most strikingly demarcate us from all other extant species. They are certainly what give us our strong subjective sense of being qualitatively different. And they are all ultimately traceable to our symbolic capacity. Human beings alone, it seems, mentally dissect the world into a multitude of discrete symbols, and combine and recombine those symbols in their minds to produce hypotheses of alternative possibilities. When exactly Homo sapiens acquired this unusual ability is the subject of debate.”
   http://www.annualreviews.org/d.....208.100202

   Leading Evolutionary Scientists Admit We Have No Evolutionary Explanation of Human Language – December 19, 2014
   Excerpt: Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.,,,
   (Marc Hauser, Charles Yang, Robert Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael J. Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky and Richard C. Lewontin, “The mystery of language evolution,” Frontiers in Psychology, Vol 5:401 (May 7, 2014).)
   It’s difficult to imagine much stronger words from a more prestigious collection of experts.
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....92141.html

   More interesting still, the three Rs, reading, writing, and arithmetic, i.e. the unique ability to process information inherent to man, are the very first things to be taught to children when they enter elementary school. And yet it is this information processing, i.e. reading, writing, and arithmetic that is found to be foundational to life:

   Signature in the Cell by Stephen Meyer – video clip
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVkdQhNdzHU

   John Lennox – Semiotic Information – video
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6rd4HEdffw

   As well, as if that was not ‘spooky enough’, information, not material, is found to be foundational to physical reality:

   “it from bit” Every “it”— every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. “It from bit” symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has a bottom—a very deep bottom, in most instances, an immaterial source and explanation, that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment—evoked responses, in short all matter and all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.”
   – Princeton University physicist John Wheeler (1911–2008) (Wheeler, John A. (1990), “Information, physics, quantum: The search for links”, in W. Zurek, Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information (Redwood City, California: Addison-Wesley))

   Why the Quantum? It from Bit? A Participatory Universe?
   Excerpt: In conclusion, it may very well be said that information is the irreducible kernel from which everything else flows. Thence the question why nature appears quantized is simply a consequence of the fact that information itself is quantized by necessity. It might even be fair to observe that the concept that information is fundamental is very old knowledge of humanity, witness for example the beginning of gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the Word.”
   Anton Zeilinger – a leading expert in quantum teleportation:
   http://www.metanexus.net/archi.....linger.pdf

   Quantum physics just got less complicated – Dec. 19, 2014
   Excerpt: Patrick Coles, Jedrzej Kaniewski, and Stephanie Wehner,,, found that ‘wave-particle duality’ is simply the quantum ‘uncertainty principle’ in disguise, reducing two mysteries to one.,,,
   “The connection between uncertainty and wave-particle duality comes out very naturally when you consider them as questions about what information you can gain about a system. Our result highlights the power of thinking about physics from the perspective of information,”,,,
   http://phys.org/news/2014-12-q.....cated.html

   It is hard to imagine a more convincing proof that we are made ‘in the image of God’, than finding that both the universe and life itself are ‘information theoretic’ in their basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an ability to understand and create information.
   I guess a more convincing evidence could be that God Himself became a man, defeated death on a cross, and then rose from the dead to prove that He was God.
   But who has ever heard of such overwhelming evidence as that?

   Turin Shroud Quantum Hologram Reveals The Words ‘The Lamb’ – video
   http://www.godtube.com/watch/?v=J21MECNU

   Solid Oval Object Under The Beard
   http://shroud3d.com/findings/s.....-the-beard

   Verse and Music:

   Genesis 1:26
   And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

   John 1:1-4
   In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and that life was the Light of men.

   Casting Crowns – The Word Is Alive
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9itgOBAxSc
4. 4
   bornagain77 says:

   July 24, 2015 at 7:09 pm

   Quote:

   It is said that maybe the atheist cannot find God (who has never been lost) for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman.
5. 5
   ppolish says:

   July 24, 2015 at 7:52 pm

   It was revealed that man was made in the image of God. Does the functionality of this piece of brain point towards that image? Maybe.

   How about measuring man/ape brains when experiencing overwhelming Love. What part of the brain lights up then. Poetry too. Math concepts.

   Gentle expirements, since stewardship and dominion come into play. And have the human sign some release of liability form.
6. 6
   Mung says:

   July 24, 2015 at 9:13 pm

   And I always thought it was our opposable thumbs that made us unique.
7. 7
   Mapou says:

   July 24, 2015 at 10:14 pm

   ppolish:

   It was revealed that man was made in the image of God. Does the functionality of this piece of brain point towards that image? Maybe.

   Or do we see God when we look into the brain? I think so. Genesis teaches us that, on the sixth day/period, the Elohim said to themselves, “let US make the Adam (humanity) in OUR image.” I’m sure we’re just like them, brain and all.
8. 8
   Robert Byers says:

   July 25, 2015 at 2:40 am

   Oh brother. YES Marcus knowing how we got to be us is important. Thats why God told us in genesis.
   They all miss the point. The memory must be involved in all this language learning and the rest. so that is where one should aim first. Where is the memory? Is the mind just a memory machine? Yes it is. then figure out we have a soul that observes this machine and BANG we know who we are.
   Simple.
   tHe bible hints at it.
9. 9
   Box says:

   July 25, 2015 at 3:58 am

   “Nothing is more important than understanding how we got to be how we are.”

   This question is important to which brain chemicals? And why do these brain chemicals want to know?
10. 10
    mike1962 says:

    July 27, 2015 at 1:55 pm

    BA77,

    Thanks for those references.