Comment by xenadu02 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xenadu02 | Hacker News Reader

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I would be very cautious here. There are many stories about how miraculously people function after brain damage or with half a brain but when examined more closely it turns out there are deficits, just not a super obvious one like inability to speak. Some of Oliver Saks' cases in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat demonstrate how functionally people can adapt to the point that others may not notice.

In many of these cases there are various skills and modes of perception impacted. Artistic talent, abstract visualization, etc. Proprioception, visual perception (not just acuity but things like recognizing abstract shapes vs "gnosis" of objects). Impulse control. Emotional regulation. Many different kinds of memory.

Even the oft-told story about Phineas Gage is mostly false. He had serious metal problems for the remainder of his life, including very poor impulse control. Was it a miracle he survived? Yes. Did he made a full and complete recovery? Absolutely not.

I would also be careful about correlating brain volume with complexity. We know volume doesn't correlate with intelligence between species. Whales are not more intelligent than humans despite having larger brains... their brains are just less densely packed. So being born with a brain that is "too small" can be less of a deficit than you might expect in some cases if the brain matter that is present is of higher complexity - though keep in mind most babies born with smaller than expected brains have profound and permanent disabilities so any contrary cases are very rare exceptions.

Yeah, fully agree on being cautious here.

On Phineas Gage — indeed, he made headlines for his seemingly "normal functioning", but the devastating impact on his emotional capacities was skipped over in the popular press! So let's hear what happened after he "fully recovered", quoting from the 1994 study on this topic by the maverick neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio[1]:

[quote]

Gage was fully recovered. He remained as able-bodied and appeared to be as intelligent as before the accident; he had no impairment of movement or speech; new learning was intact, and neither memory nor intelligence in the conventional sense had been affected.

On the other hand, he had become irreverent and capricious. His respect for the social conventions by which he once abided had vanished. His abundant profanity offended those around him. Perhaps most troubling, he had taken leave of his sense of responsibility. He could not be trusted to honor his commitments. His employers had deemed him "the most efficient and capable" man in their "employ" but now had to dismiss him. In the words of his physician, "the equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculty and animal propensities" had been destroyed.

In the words of his friends and acquaintances, "Gage was no longer Gage". Gage began a new life of wandering that ended a dozen years later, in San Francisco, under the custody of his family. Gage never returned to a fully independent existence, never again held a job comparable to the one he once had. His accident had made headlines but his death went unnoticed.

[/quote]

[1] http://jneunuebel.psych.udel.edu/Webpage/Courses/assets/Pape...

Perhaps you're the one who should be a bit more cautious?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage#Exaggeration_and_...

Harlow's statement that Gage "continued to work in various places; could not do much, changing often, and always finding something that did not suit him in every place he tried" refers only to Gage's final months, after convulsions had set in. But it has been misinterpreted as meaning that Gage never held a regular job after his accident [and] "never returned to a fully independent existence"... In fact, after his initial post-recovery months spent traveling and exhibiting, Gage supported himself — at a total of just two different jobs — from early 1851 until just before his death in 1860.

His symptoms and treatment were over-interpreted and perhaps exaggerated for ideological reasons even by his contemporaries:

Bigelow's and Harlow's contradictory evaluations (less than a year apart) by differences in their educational backgrounds, in particular their attitudes toward cerebral localization (the idea that different regions of the brain are specialized for different functions) and phrenology (the nineteenth-century pseudoscience that held that talents and personality can be inferred from the shape of a person's skull)...

He seems also to have lucked into an ideal treatment program shortly after the accident:

Gage's stagecoach work — "a highly structured environment in which clear sequences of tasks were required [but within which] contingencies requiring foresight and planning arose daily" — resembles rehabilitation regimens first developed by Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria for the reestablishment of self-regulation in World War II soldiers suffering frontal lobe injuries

(One easy mistake to make is taking a neuroscientist as an historiographer just because the historical topic happens to involve a brain.)

Thanks for the extra details. I do agree with your last point.

That said, perhaps you could be a bit more charitable? I was not trying to provide extensive treatise on Gage's injury. I was highlighting one specific point of emotional impairment due to damage to PFC.

I used the exact same framing you did, less the twee-lecturer "So let's hear..." crap.

Okay, it's clear you overparsed it, as you seem to be needlessly upset. Please take it easy, and try not to read minds on the Internet.

"I've read your mind and determined you shouldn't try to read minds" ok buddy? This thread got real weird real fast.

As someone who has had a severe TBI (traumatic brain injury) as a child, I, at times in my life, have spent time thinking about this. And I agree with your sentiment.

On one hand, I'm a competent software engineer. I think I'm fairly good at problem solving -- not great and really only learn by example as opposed to creating novel solutions on my own. I have learned, anecdotally, that I may have a better biographical memory (including world events happening at the time when recalling life experiences) than some of my peers. On the other hand, I feel like I lack certain skills that most adults have or are expected to have (whether it be due to impulse control, etc.).

And then there are more abstract things, like abstract visualization as you mention. I realized (thanks to a BBC article [1] on Hacker News a number of years ago) that people generally are able to visualize images in their head to various degrees. Some can represent images with picture- perfect quality, say of a loved one. Others at the very least can conjure up an image of, say, a crowded beach on a summer day. I on the other hand can't visualize anything at all, which I realized impacted my score on an IQ test after my TBI in which I was told a series of numbers and was expected to visualize them sequentially in my head. Whether it has anything to do with my TBI, I'm not sure. But I would love to find out more all these years later.

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054

Lots of people think differently without having brain injuries.

There are people with no internal monolog, for example. They don't "talk" internally.

Another example is that while I "see" things easily, they are very abstract. It doesn't relate to world world things, but they can create intuitive connections. I can't really think that well without "day dreaming" and staring off into the distance.

However I can't really "hear" things internally. Sometimes, rarely, I can listen to music in my brain as if I am hearing it, but it's a fluke. It is extremely unusual.

Were as I have had musician friends that can record and playback every note internally. I remember back in the day when Little Caesars had "Simon Says" style musical game were you could win a free pizza... the owner of the store would get so angry at my friend for effortlessly beating it that he would just hand him a free pizza and tell him to leave every time we would show up with a handful of quarters. He would have to lose on purpose so we could win just a free soda to go along with the free pizzas.

My girlfriend, when she hears a catchy song, can have it playing so loudly in her head that it will keep her up at night. It is not something she has lot of control over. I am banned from playing certain songs around her because it will fuck up her sleep schedule. It is not even related to whether she likes the song or not.

According to her the most evil song that ever created is 4 Non Blondes' "What's Up".

I think the idea that "we need to be cautious" in regards to the article is missing the point. It's not trying to claim that "If you get head injury everything will be alright".

I think the main point is something more along the lines of:

We don't know how the brain works. When people talk about "language centers" and this part of the brain does that... They are factually wrong. They don't know that.

They know that MRIs can show different parts of the brain getting more or less blood flow when people see different things or carry out different tasks, and there is some correlation between different types of brain injury and different types of cognitive impairment, but the ultimate meaning behind all that is still largely a mystery.

>They know that MRIs can show different parts of the brain getting more or less blood flow

I always wondered about this as a casual person with a heavy consumption rate of neuroscience. I fallen in to thinking of the "active" brain areas similar to lakes. places where activity seems to collect. if you remove the lake bed (fill it in? analogy breaks down here) then the activity will just collect itself in a different location. It might look / act a bit different from how it was before, but would still fit the profile overall - hence 'retraining' being possible.

disclaimer: just personal thoughts, not backed by anything specific

I came to believe that this types of skills, especially visualization, are learnable. For some people it looks like this skills are somehow natural but this can be just an accident of upbringing and time allocation.

The thing that convinced me that they are not innate is my own journey with drawing and guitar playing. At first (around 15 years ago) I thought that I have some brain deficiency that makes it impossible to visualize things that I draw and remember simple melodies (I even thought that I was tone deaf). But when I invested a lot of time in it (thousands of hours probably) something clicked and suddenly those mysterious abilities materialized in ma head. There surly is some element of talent to it - there are people that would get there a lot quicker, but I believe that for most deliberate practice and a lot of time would do wonders.

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