Latest Issue of the MindBrainEd Think Tank + (ISSN 2434-1002) 3 MindBrained Bulletin Think Tank Work Mem Mar 1 2 | Page 13
Almost all our discussions on the brain are framed by a specific terminology – short-
term memory, long-term memory, emotion, cognition, reasoning, vision, motor
control and almost every other term we use in relation to brain. We speak of them as
things in the brain, or places, that really exist. It is how we talk and it is how we
write, as we are here. So, it is easy to forget that these terms are just simple pictures
we drew ages ago of what we thought the brain was doing. Most of these concepts
came into being even before we knew neurons existed. They have helped us
tremendously in advancing our understanding of learning and cognition, but as
Spencer taught me, we must remember they are just abstract concepts that we have
imposed from the outside. They are not the brain itself. From the brain’s perspective,
memory, emotion, logic do not exist. There is just one simple, but relatively
incomprehensible, thing going on: the modulation of neuronal networks.
Since these abstractions are stereotypes, like all stereotypes, they cause distortions.
For example, consider Broca’s Area. The Google dictionary says it is “a region of the
brain concerned with the production of speech.” It is hard not to picture it, as I did
most of my life, as a bounded area in the brain that exists just to produce speech.
“Area.” That is the first distortion. Very little of the brain really exists in clear,
separate areas. And yet terminology like that, supported by the distortion MRI also
produces, has led us to conceptualize the brain as separate regions with separate
functions, in discrete “areas.” Now, we know the brain is not organized that way.
Everything is connected and most of the boundaries we drew are as much a fiction as
the colors drawn on a map.
…Kennedy and his colleagues now show the human brain to be a densely
connected network, where about 70 percent of the brain is connected to every
other area. source
The notion that everything is connected to everything else might seem obvious now,
but even just ten years ago, it was not. Why were we so slow in coming to this
realization? I suspect the terminology we used, along with the computer metaphor,
caused this distortion.
Getting back to Broca’s Area, another distortion comes from the words “speech” and
“language.” We tend to conceive of language as a special, separate thing in the brain.
But again, to the brain, it is just certain neurons firing, neurons that also fire for
other things, like memory, motor, visual and other kinds of processing. We have
long asked the question: “Language, where in the brain is it processed?” not realizing
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