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Twenty-one gun salute: New issue of Salvo

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The 21st and latest edition. Salvo is an unequivocally ID-friendly Christian mag.

Salvo avoids Christian prof snores like the dead loss they are. We don’t care what Darwin’s mob thinks (think? Don’t they believe the mind is an illusion?)

Anyway, here’s Robin Phillips on “Neurotansformers: Culture and the malleability of the human brain”:

We now understand that these types of variations in the brains of different people groups have nothing to do with genetics at all. The physiological structure of our brains, including hundreds of thousands of neuro-connections, do evolve to adapt themselves to our natural and cultural habitats, but this evolution occurs within a single lifetime without leaving a footprint on the genetic code.

This was demonstrated through a study of brain scans done on London taxi drivers in the late 1990s. Researchers found that, in the cabbies, the posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain that stores spatial representations, was considerably larger than in non-cab drivers. Now, clearly, a London taxi-driver’s genetic make-up is not fundamentally different from a London mechanic’s or a London web designer’s, yet there are very clear structural differences in their brains. How did this come about?

Neuroplasticity

Well, it isn’t rocket science. Your brain is like a muscle: the more you train it in a particular skill—like learning a language, mastering a musical instrument, navigating London, or hunting underwater with your eyes open—the better it gets at that skill. And just as regular bench-pressing causes changes in the structure of your pectorals, deltoids, and triceps, so, too, continued exercise of your brain “muscles” causes actual changes in the neurocircuitry of your brain.

Robin Phillips., the obesity gene, the gambling gene, and the crime gene all totally hate you forever.

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