Bill Park (park at netcom.com) wrote:
: I have just enjoyed reading
: Norman D. Cook, _The Brain Code. Mechanisms of Information Transfer
: and the Role of the Corpus Callosum_, London and New York,
: Methuen & Co., ISBN-N-0-416-40840-0 (1986).
: and was quite impressed with Cook's seven-year-old theory.
: ------- SUMMARY -------
: Very briefly, Cook proposed that an important function of the corpus
: callosum is to activate, on the cortex of the right hemisphere, those
: concepts that constitute the "context" of (i.e., the concepts most
: closely-associated with) any concept that is currently activated on
: the left hemisphere. His explanation posits the presence of several
Does Cook's theory (I'm unfamiliar with it) explain language parsing
in split-brain patients? If not, it seems that split-brain patients
parsing of language would be incredibly lethargic, when it is not...
: Among other predictions, Cook suggested that his model would help to
: explain the extreme speed and accuracy with which people can
: disambiguate language as they listen to speech or read: The right
(see above)
: 5) Cook never seems to get around to explaining the mechanism by which
: the right hemisphere aids the left.
could it be possible that one hemisphere can take over both jobs?
: The question of the stability of such an iterative process is
: interesting. So that the reader can investigate it, Cook gives a
: MicroSoft BASIC program to simulate it and even to compute the
: resulting artificial EEG signal produced by the simplified artificial
: brain as it "thinks." Unfortunately, he doesn't show any results of
: running this program, only refers to some earlier papers.
Can someone type this in and get it to the net?
I'd love to examine it....
: If it doesn't terminate, does that suggest a mechanism for the "monkey
: chatter" of thoughts that Eastern meditation attempts to suppress?
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Adams jna at acs.bu.edujna at silver.lcs.mit.edu
Boston University +============================================================
458 Beacon St | CS / Cognitive Neural Systems hopeful...
Boston, MA 02115 | :)
617.765.0818 |
------------------+------------------------------------------------------------
