29 Dec When It Comes to the Brain, Maps + Data = Maps + Data
“Are We Living in the Age of the Brain?”
In Prospect magazine.science writer Philip Ball does a good job exploring what all the brain research that’s going on might—and might not—mean. His reservations, in part, have to do with generating more and more data for our already overweight brains.
“But the challenges for the American and European brain projects in particular run deeper than all this. They are data-gathering exercises akin to the Human Genome Project. We can now see what that latter project got us: a load of data. That’s no criticism; data is good. It is already extremely useful to our understanding of genomics advances. But now that we have the “genome book,” all three billion letters of it bound and housed in the Wellcome Trust, we are like English speakers who have learnt to recite Russian poems fluently without knowing what they mean.”
Here’s another effective analogy from Ball:
“But the risk is that this [mapping the brain] is like trying to understand human culture using Google Earth—or rather, cultures, for there is just a single geography but plenty of conflicts, compromises and confusion going on within it.”
Raquell Holmes
Posted at 16:55h, 21 AprilThanks for the link to this article by Ball. I really appreciated it. A refreshing look at how the brain, an organ or part of the nerve system is overweighted. Too much credit given to a feature as if it’s independent of everything else. It is reduced to where it tell us little about thought.
“Resolution of conflicting mental signals is certainly not ignored by cognitive scientists or psychologists, but there seems often to be a disjuncture between the neuroscientific model of the brain as a problem-solving network and the actual experience of the brain as a medley, even a bedlam, of imperatives and impulses.”
I love the google earth for culture reference. I often say the difference between road maps for cities and knowing traffic, potholes or broken bridges. Knowing maps tells you very little to nothing about the latter.
How does Mind relate to cognition or brain? The Ball article points to the whole body experience of thought and emotion. There’s not a separation. I don’t study Mind. I have studied cells and even neurons. Is Mind a reference that takes more of the body, the social and cultural context into account?
susan massad
Posted at 01:07h, 31 DecemberBall’s article is interesting. He raises the question for me about data collection. In most brain studies and genetic studies data is based on a single moment in the life processes of genes and brain cells and then the various observations are put together to create the Google Map. What is missing, as Ball rightly points out, is the real day to day activity of human mental life that is much more convoluted, conflicted, and disorganized than the map. I could not tell from the article if he thought if we were asking better questions in pursuing data, and/or had a better theory to work with, that the data could tell us more. To me we should always ask the question of how we are going to use data, but there is also a flaw in how we study the brain or genes in isolation from real life activity. An example: The static nature of the gennome has been put into question by the field of epigenetics that is looking at the impact of environment,social and cultural, as well as biological, on genes and gene activity. Our genes seem to be changing as is everything else in our lives.