Skip to main content

sighs about size

Scientists say that the speech areas (those that kick in when we are hearing or expressing) are larger in humans than in other primates.  Yes, but why?  I know it's supposed to be in our genes, but I can't help but wonder about how much of the larger size of these areas is a function of practices rather than DNA. 

Consider the brain of a violinist: the area responsible for the control of his hand movement is larger than it is for non-violinists (who don't use hand skills with the same level of precision).  This largeness, however, is a function of practices.  It's large because he's a violinist rather than vice versa.

Why can't the same be true for humans vis-a-vis non-humans?  In other words, it may be the case that humans have larger areas for communication than non-humans have for the same because humans are such intensive communicators.  Perhaps the average Joe is, in comparison to the bonono, a maestro at gesturing.

I need to restudy about this: maybe the claim is that we have a unique area rather than have an area of a unique size.  Maybe this area is larger even in early infancy. And maybe someone who aspires to become a violinist needs to have talented hands and these are in turn a function of genes.

Assuming I am not totally off base, it would be interesting to find out the size of the language use area(s) in someone who never learned to communicate.  Feral children would make an ideal control group, but then again generating such a control group would be a wee bit controversial.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...

what is an organism?

How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...