sandip@oddjob.UUCP (Sandip Chakra) (06/20/85)
A few days ago I posted an article questioning darwinism. I gave the following example which I learnt from a PBS TV show that human being cat act in a rather normal fashion by using even a few (I put the number ~5%) percent of the brain cells. Then I asked if that is the case then why the size of the brain of a human evolved to 6 times as that of say, Orung-Otung ( This I learnt from some biology book long ago.) I got two types of answers. Some of you think that this is a folk theorem. Now since I *have* seen on TV screen that even though most of the brain cells are damaged (as revealed by Tomographic Techniques) people are working fine, I may say, that there is justification of emerging such theorems. But some of you gave much deeper reasons why such people are functioning. The reason seemed to be (if I understand correctly) that if brain is damaged after an extensive training period then even a part (not at random I suppose) may work as a whole. This may be correct but this leaves me in the following dilemma. Couple of years ago I heard a talk by a professor of Princeton who was trying to simulate the function of the brain by an intricate network. Among other things he seemed to have convinced us that the following scenario of how we remember things is true. Suppose , a particular information is *definitely* known if 10,000 cells carrying the information about it are all functioning perfectly. Now, obviously, it is impossible to believe that every information will be lost if only one of the cells are damaged, or, say 10% of the cells are damaged. What the professor showed that if we represent perfect remembering as a curve with a sharp peak, then it becomes more and more *gaussian* like broad peaked when some of the cells are damaged. The width of the peak, is found to be proportional (in someway, not necessarily linearly) to the numbers of cells damaged (or, in the case of the simulation, number of wires are disconnected). Whereas I donot doubt that there is a place of training (which increasingly sharpens the peak of the curve to begin with), I still think normal functioning would be seriously impared, if a man actually uses 100 percent of his brain cells before an accident and then loses, 90% of them. I think some you may be able to clear this thing up for me. Sandip Chakra