Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnabgib | Hacker News Reader

> Together, these results suggest convergent structural remodeling and functional tuning in service of expert performance across the lifespan

Is a long leap from this article's title. Paper:

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/46/12/e1307252026

View on HN

The BBC article is perhaps truer to the paper:

  Erik Wing, who led this research at Baycrest Academy for Research and Education in Toronto, Canada, compared MRI brain scans from bird experts to those of novices while they identified birds. He found that expert brains were wired differently in regions important for functions like attention, visual perception and visual recognition.

The study only (?) looked at the brains of birdwatchers, the paper extrapolates the study to make assertions about the brains of active subject experts in general.

I agree, it would be interesting to see if there are some cognitive advantages associated with the "special interests" personality traits, in general.

Nominative determinism strikes again.

"He found that expert brains were wired differently in regions important for functions like attention, visual perception and visual recognition."

Can we be sure that happened because of the bird watching, or did they reach expert level because their brain is wired differently?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com