New Senses and New Selves – On Brain Implants
Implants + Internet = ImplanTelepathy™!
Less is more? A strange case of improvement in intelligence & personality after removal of prefrontal cortical tissue!
While reading a paper on the neuroscience of dreaming I came across a reference to a 1940 paper by Donald Hebb and Wilder Penfield. It’s a neurosurgery case study that is quite stunning. It shows that in some cases, removal of prefrontal brain tissue can actually cause improvements in intelligence and personality. So basically it’s the opposite of the Phineas Gage story.
Here are some excerpts from the paper:
In what format is information stored in the brain?
I was asked this question on Quora.
We don’t really know. But as one of my professors once said half-jokingly, “the brain is a bag of tricks”. There is no reason to assume that all brain regions use the same coding scheme.
Here are some basic concepts that guide how neuroscientists think about information in the brain:
The holy grail of computational neuroscience: Invariance
There are quite a few problems that computational neuroscientists need to solve in order to achieve a true theoretical understanding of biological intelligence. But I'd like to talk about one…