PPP, Part 8, Modular Brains

Greetings, Friendlies!

Coming off the highs of irreverent pāli translations, we descend into the doldrums of cognitive explication. (Not for me. I LUV this stuff. But I get that it’s not for eveyone.)

So. Modular Brains.

This concept came up previously in the “Viññāṇa/Consciousness Of” post. But respecting our PPP Methodology it is here broken out into an atomic unit.

Imagine two states of affairs for the structure/function of your brain. In the first, your brain is “equipotential”. That is, all the neurons in the brain are connected to all the other neurons in the brain, and any neuron can replace the function of any other neuron. If, heaven forbid, there is damage to a few neurons, no problem. The rest of the brain makes up the difference. Intelligence is based primarily on the size of the brain (aka, the number of neurons).

In the second state of affairs, your brain is “modular”. Neurons develop into sub-parts, both spatially and functionally. One part is responsible for, say, spoken language comprehension. Another part is, say, responsible for written language comprehension. Yet another part is responsible for processing incoming information from your left big toe. If damage should occur to those neurons in that spatially-defined subpart, there would be a deficit in that specific function. In, say, the ability to comprehend spoken language, or written language, or to know about the left big toe.

The dominant theory has pendulumed over the ages. In Who’s In Charge? (2011) Gazzaniga claims that, for the most part, the mind is modular. [1] Neuroplasticity is real, and parts of the brain can grow compensatory mechanisms if damage occurs, but when the brain is forming itself, it forms in particular patterns, with particular neurons connected in particular ways, managing particular functions.

This has a lot to do with those Cool Avijjā Examples we talked about earlier. And about more cool stuff 🤓 that is to come.

With friendliness!

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[1] In Master and His Emissary (2019), Ian McGilchrist says, “we now realise we need to think much more in terms of widely distributed networks, rather than, as we used to do, primarily in terms of ‘modules’.” So…