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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBen Carson Just Got a Whole Lot Wrong About the Brain
It remembers everything youve ever seen. Everything youve ever heard. I could take the oldest person here, make a hole right here on the side of the head, and put some depth electrodes into their hippocampus and stimulate, and they would be able to recite back to you verbatim a book they read 60 years ago. Its all there; it doesnt go away. You just have to learn how to recall it. But thats what your brain is capable of. It can process more than 2 million bits of information per second. You cant overload it. Have you ever heard people say, Dont do all that, youll overload your brain. You cant overload the human brain. If you learned one new fact every second, it would take you more than 3 million years to challenge the capacity of your brain.
Its utter nonsense, emailed Dan Simons, a psychologist at the University of Illinois who specializes in attention and memory. We cant recall extended text verbatim unless we deliberately memorized it for that purpose (certainly not books we happened to read 60 years ago), you cant trigger accurate recall of detailed memories with an electrode (and long-term memories arent stored in the hippocampus), we dont store a perfect and permanent record of our experiences (its not all there just waiting to be probed), and you cant just learn how to recall it.'
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Yeah, but what about the electrode thing? To say that you could do that assumes that you know where you could actually find those memories, which we dont know how to do, Ramirez says. There are a lot of different kinds of memorieshow to ride a bike versus your phone number versus where you were when you heard about 9/11and while some of them hang out in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, the really permanent stuff seems not to rely on the hippocampus at all. Thats why people like Patient HM, a famous subject of memory research who had most of his hippocampus removed when he was a young man, could remember a lot of stuff about his childhood.
In a few cases, neurosurgeons have managed to get a patient to recall a memory by zapping the hippocampus with an electrode, but they cant control it the way Carson suggestsif the memory of page 47 of Hamlet is even in there. Were barely able to activate fear or pleasure in an animal, let alone one among the constellation of memories that humans actually have, Ramirez says.
Even if scientists could do it, they might not be getting an accurate memory. Memory isnt a videotape library. Its a dynamic, adaptive system, says John Coley, a cognitive scientist at Northeastern. The way we encode and recall memories changes them. It may be in there, but unless you use it, it can go away, and the way you use it can change it.
https://www.wired.com/2017/03/ben-carson-just-got-whole-lot-wrong-brain/
Great. Even in the area he's meant to be an expert, he's dishing out dubious claims.
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Ben Carson Just Got a Whole Lot Wrong About the Brain (Original Post)
muriel_volestrangler
Mar 2017
OP
Another thread said 8 times. Once left a sponge in a woman's brain. . . . nt
Bernardo de La Paz
Mar 2017
#3
Ilsa
(61,698 posts)1. I wonder if he was sued (malpractice) into retirement. nt
Bernardo de La Paz
(49,036 posts)3. Another thread said 8 times. Once left a sponge in a woman's brain. . . . nt
Chemisse
(30,817 posts)2. I'm starting to think he experimented on his own brain.
How can someone be brilliant enough to become a brain surgeon, yet seem so dumb?
GWC58
(2,678 posts)4. Most brilliant people, and Carson
is brilliant, lack common sense.
WePurrsevere
(24,259 posts)6. Ask nurses who have been around for a few years.
It's been almost 3 decades since I left nursing in frustration and then became a patient with a chronic illness (and then a co-full-time caregiver of in-laws) ready to smack the snot out of some doctors.
n2doc
(47,953 posts)8. Smart people can be nuts
I've known a few. Clearly Carson is one of them.
VMA131Marine
(4,149 posts)5. I think Dr Carson is on an extended acid trip
He certainly acts like it at times.
milestogo
(16,829 posts)7. Carson was a neurosurgeon - the brain was just a piece of meat
for him to carve up. He never knew what the brain was actually for.