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Brains are neat. For example, I was "not strongly handed" as a kid, ended up being right-handed for the majority of my life, then abruptly switched back to being totally ambidextrous, then started favoring my left for most things. Despite being ambidextrous, I only draw with my right; if I put a pen in my left hand I can't think of anything to draw and can't reproduce anything I'm looking at. It's like I suddenly draw a blank. Any biologist/linguists/whoever know some cool facts about brain areas and the weird things they do?
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Jun 30, 2015 06:29
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If you cut a brain in half, you get two people, kinda. brain science.
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Jun 30, 2015 10:59
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i know that wernicke's aphasia effects sign language. thats kinda weird
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Jul 2, 2015 03:18
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The thing is, when you're well-studied in brain science, the "weird" things stop being weird. But I guess I can list some things that I remember finding interesting when I first learned them: -Car experts activate their fusiform face area when looking at a car -Do you know about the mirror neuron system? It is cool. A given mirror neuron activates both when performing a certain motor action, and when watching someone else do the same action. It enables our brains to automatically simulate backwards and see the intention we would have that drove, that action, and so probably what that person is feeling or thinking, without deliberately reasoning about it. This is the basis for empathy. IIRC, some studies have suggested that autistic children have an excess of neurons in that system, which interfere with others, causing dysfunction. -Theory of mind (e.g. knowing that they don't think it be like it is, even though it do) develops during ages 4-5. In one experiment, they show a video where a person drops a ball in a box and leaves the room, then another person moves the ball into a different box. Ask a young pre-schooler where the first person will look for the ball, and they just point to where the ball is, not where he left it. -Kids are pretty stupid. I forget the age on this one, but if you pour a bunch of water into a wide glass, and less water in a thin glass (each poured from equal sized cups) so that the thin glass has a higher water level, and ask a stupid little kid which one has more water, they point to the taller water level even though they saw where the greater amount of water was poured. -There are three main types of memory: working, long-term, and procedural. Long-term is split between semantic memory (most of us would call it knowledge) and narrative memory (your life story). It has been shown that certain patients with anterograde amnesia due to lesions in the medial parietal cortex, meaning they can't form new memories (so each day back to square one like in 50 First Dates), could still practice Tetris and keep getting better at it day by day, because the area responsible for procedural memory was still intact. Also, sleep is when you consolidate new experiences and learning into long-term memory, which is why all-nighters for students are less effective than sleep, even when said all-nighter is not immediately prior to a test.
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Aug 23, 2015 22:57
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