neuroscience training?

[Peter F.]

"John H." <johnh at faraway.> wrote in message
news:405037d3 at dnews.tpgi.com.au...

> Okay, there is a certain style of modularity in the brain but if you
examine
> the data you also find some very intriguing exceptions. Last year some
> German scientists studied how female brains handle language through the
> course of the menstrual cycle. To their surprise they found noted
> differences across the cycle. Not small regionally specific differences
> either, but wholesale changes in left-right balance in language production
> and comprehension. <snip>

Hormonally or otherwise induced functional plasticity does not destroy *my*
concept of modularity
%-|

> The work of John Lorber on microencephalics and\or those who had shunts
> inserted because of hydroencephalus raises some perplexing questions about
> brain organisation.

There is both genetic and epigenetic [check-out Cabej in sci.bio.evolution]
programming at the cell chemical bottom of behaviour.

Leslie A. Hart's notion of prosters (from "program structures") and and her
jukebox metaphor is as good enough conceptual
platform/position/starting-point to build my notion of "actention modules"
on/from as any, ASFAIC.


> The point is this Peter: As the physicist John Wheeler once commented, "In
> any discipline find the strangest thing and then explore it."

Good idea. Precisely my approach at reality-checking my 'EPT thinking'.
(That sounded more arrogant than I actually feel.)

> Neuroscience it seems that many fail to appreciate the wisdom of this
> advice.

There are IMHO a lot of skilled and competent research done only to be
concluded with shoddy interpretations.

But this kind shoddiness, that I tend to notice, is usually to do with a
failure to fit the results into a big and completely enough plotted picture.

CURSES type memories caused by slow SHITS (~ditto trauma) constitute (for
reasons of our 'AEVASIVEness') is the very most notoriously neglected
category of factors I can think of.

> I'm a rampant iconoclast, and being blessed with a good memory, well
> I'm just a real bastard to deal with at times.

In the first respect you have an ally and fellow marauder ;-)

As far as memory capacity goes - perhaps I could say that I am at best
blessed with a memory unencumbered by names, dates, and only sometimes
unnecessary other details. ;->

>
> Some may say that reward processes are mediated by the VTA - Acc - PFC
> dynamics, I suggest this simply reflects our current state of knowledge.
No,
> I'm not opting for a Lashley style of distributed processing, I think
> Lashley's results are better explained by reference to the immunological
> impact arising from multiple cortical insults.
>
> Shallice &??? put forward a supervisory attention system, Goldman-Rakic
and
> others argue for multiple attentional processes. A typical example of the
> history of neuroscience. It starts out simple then just gets messier and
> messier ... .

I have noted that I have a somewhat similar tendency to mess up. As a
counter-measure I have deliberately forced myself to adopt a Tolerance
Principle attitude. (That is, I have as far as I can kick myself.  :-)

P