REFRESH OUR MIND -- PART 27

BRAIN TELLS YOU WHAT'S LIVING AND WHAT'S NOT

New research shows that even in people who have been blind since birth, the brain still separates living and non-living objects. "If both sighted people and people with blindness process the same ideas in the sameparts of the brain, then it follows that visual experience is not necessary in order for those aspects of brain organisation to develop," said Bradford Mahon, study co-author, University of Rochester. "We think this means significant parts of the brain are innately structured around a few domains of knowledge that were critical in humans' evolutionary history." Previous studies have shown that the sight of certain objects, such as a table or mountain, activate regions of the brain other than the sight of living objects, such as an animal or face - but why the brain would choose to process these two categories differently has remained a mystery, said Mahon. Since the regions were known to activate when the objects were seen, scientists wondered if something about the visual appearance of the objects determined how the brain would process them. For instance, said Mahon, most living things have curved forms, and so many scientists thought the brain prefers to process images of living things in an area that is optimised for curved forms.To see if the appearance of objects is indeed key to how the brain conducts its processing, Mahon and his team, led by Alfonso Caramazza, director of the Cognitive Neuro psychology Laboratory at Harvard University, asked people who have been blind since birth to think about certain living and non-living objects. These people had no visual experience at all, so their brains necessarily determined where to do the processing using some criteria other than an object's appearance. "When we looked at the MRI scans, it was pretty clear that blind people and sighted people were dividing up living and non-living processing in the same way," said Mahon. These findings were published in Neuron.

REFRESH YOUR MIND

Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines........ R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

You can do anything, but not everything......DAVID ALLEN

To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail....ABRAHAM MASLOW

Never play a thing the same way twice.......LOUIS ARMSTRONG

Rudeness is the weak person's imitation of strength..... ERIC HOFFER

Judgment comes from experience and great judgment comes from bad experience.....BOB PACKWOOD

What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.......OSCAR LEVANT

The follies which a man regrets the most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.....HELEN ROWLAND

The largest living land mammal is the absent mind.....CAPT. BEEFHEART

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sypathethic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of those.........GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER

Getting things done is not always what is most important.There is value in allowing others to learn, even if the task is not accomplished as quickly, efficiently or effectively.....R.D. CLYDE

It's never too late -- never too late to start over, never too late to be happy.....JANE FONDA