Look--A post that's NOT about my mental health!!

[a_winter_dawn]

Started a new project today. Combing through an advanced book on neural science. It's old, 1991. Chapters are short, though, the workload is managable if I keep at it, and it's hella interesting

Comments

[tealight_rookie]

Wow, that's all really interesting...

[puf_almighty]

Re: Broca/Wernicke's

Huh. That is neat. You think that relates at all to the (our?) idea about emotions/logic being two separate adaptions?

In the same way that two species can develop, over time, from divergent adaptations of one species (i.e. Darwin's Finches that got separated on different islands and then adapted to different nuts), and we assume that specialized body parts work the same way within a species (i.e opposeable thumbs being an adaptation from what used to be a paw), I wonder if that could be the case for the brain.

Like it used to be two redundant lobes that did the same thing, and it has since been adapted so that either one, or both, is now specialized. It'd make sense to me that it was the left that was specialized, what with the whole language-as-a-rare-feature thing, right?

Details on the epilepsy thing!

[a_winter_dawn]

Your idea. This is the first I remember hearing about it. It sounds logical, though, except I didn't understand what you meant in the last sentence.

As for epilepsy, there was a brief discussion on my dj about it, but ultimately I think it would take digging through some research to come up with the answer, and I'm not willing to slow down for that; not for this topic.

And completely off-subject, I read a story in my literature book about Mrs. Malaprop, and thought of you :)

[puf_almighty]

Well I was talkin about it under the sigh outside Jack in the Box, by Spec's. And I said "I think logic is a behavioral development in which we're still manipulating and addressing emotions, just more formally, rather than a discrete mode of thought," and you convinced me that it's possibly just an adaptation and refinement of what was originally emotion. So like evolving a foot from what was a paw, we evolve a left brain and a right brain from what was originally just largely parallel, redundant in function, brain

[a_winter_dawn]

Also, remember (as the book pointed out) that these are common locations of function in a healthy brain, but it has been shown that, for instance, if damage is done to a young brain in the place where Wernicke's Area would normally be, they'll just develop that functionality somewhere else.

The textbook also made the leap that the locations made "sense" in the sense that Wernicke's Area is near the temporal lobe (where sensory info is processed) and Broca's Area is right next to the motor controls for the mouth and vocal cords. So I wonder if there is some structure with emotional functionality that is more on the right side of the brain. Like maybe the hippocampus? (I'm pretty sure the hippocampus is the brain part most associated with emotion, but my grasp of gross anatomy was always atrocious.)