From ScienceDaily:
The idea that integrating abstract information drives many of the human brain’s unique abilities has been around for decades. But a paper published1 in Current Biology, which directly compares activity in human and macaque monkey brains as they listen to simple auditory patterns, provides the first physical evidence that a specific area for such integration may exist in humans. 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.”
Always the search for simple answers. As if.
Here’s the abstract:
The ability to extract deep structures from auditory sequences is a fundamental prerequisite of language acquisition. Using fMRI in untrained macaques and humans, we investigated the brain areas involved in representing two abstract properties of a series of tones: total number of items and tone-repetition pattern. Both species represented the number of tones in intraparietal and dorsal premotor areas and the tone-repetition pattern in ventral prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia. However, we observed a joint sensitivity to both parameters only in humans, within bilateral inferior frontal and superior temporal regions. In the left hemisphere, those sites coincided with areas involved in language processing. Thus, while some abstract properties of auditory sequences are available to non-human primates, a recently evolved circuit may endow humans with a unique ability for representing linguistic and non-linguistic sequences in a unified manner. (paywall) – Wang, L., Uhrig, L., Jarraya, B. & Dehaene, S. Curr. Biol.
See also: The Science Fictions series on the human mind
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As to:
“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.
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:
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,,,
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:
In further comment from the neuro-surgeons in the John Hopkins study:
As to our unique linguistic/mathematical ability
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:
As well, as if that was not ‘spooky enough’, information, not material, is found to be foundational to physical reality:
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?
Verse and Music:
Quote:
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.
And I always thought it was our opposable thumbs that made us unique.
ppolish:
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.
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.
This question is important to which brain chemicals? And why do these brain chemicals want to know?
BA77,
Thanks for those references.