tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post6568052990406260996..comments2024-03-28T04:04:55.806-07:00Comments on Faculty of Language: Brains, minds and modulesNorberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-61701043014602963822014-11-23T13:10:34.445-08:002014-11-23T13:10:34.445-08:00Here is mark Johnson via me. For some reason he i...Here is mark Johnson via me. For some reason he is still having trouble replying. Any of you with compassion for our technologically challenged CS friends, feel free to advice. BTW, Mark insists that this is not competence but prioritizing. As my daughter would once have said: whatever:<br /><br />Sounds reasonable to me, but I'd like to hear what real neuroscientists (e.g., Hickock and Poeppel) have to say. <br /><br />My neuroscience is a bit old, but I believe that roughly speaking brain development proceeds by laying down an extremely rich set of neuronal connections along predefined pathways and experience determines which of these die off, which is certainly consistent with a nativist position.<br /><br />However, there are experiments (with chinchillas, I think) where the auditory and visual nerves are swapped at birth (I think of this as "plugging" the audio cable into the video input, and vice versa) and apparently the animal develops sort of normally. I amazed this can be done at all (think how hard it is to get your computer to talk to a video projector, even when the plugs are in the right sockets). The fact that the animal can apparently (sort of) see and hear is an amazing demonstration of plasticity, since I would have expected that the visual system, being evolutionarily rather ancient, would be somewhere where you'd find all kinds of specialised "hardwired" circuitry. This is consistent with the hypothesis that the genetic code specifies fairly generic domain-independent circuitry, which experience (dare I say "learning" on Norbert's blog?) specialises to the domain. But I have no idea what kinds of circuits might somehow develop both into (chinchilla) sound or vision, and what kind of "learning" process might enable them to do this. <br /><br />It would be interesting to hear about the "rewiring experiments" that don't work. What happens if you plug a sensory nerve into a motor area, for example? This would give us a hint about the limits of this plasticity.<br /><br />So there are deep mysteries here!<br /> Norberthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.com