> It can also retask those regions to other things, which is the cause of 
> phantom limb effects. Touch on the cheek is very "close" to where the 
> motor cortex for an arm is located, so lose the arm, the tissue retasks 
> to touch, and you get the "feeling" that your nonexistent arm is 
> touched, when your cheek is touched. Wackier bugs show up in people like 
> one women who went into uncontrollable sneezing every time she hit... 
> well, lets just say got real happy. More minor mis-wiring can cause 
> anything from minor auditory halucinations, vision errors, transposition 
> of colors with letters and words, and a whole list of other wacky stuff. 
> So yeah, there is a *general* framework that says X *should be* tasked 
> to motor skills, and linked via nerve networks to Y body part, but 
> beyond that, anything goes, and sometimes the diagram for which parts 
> connect to what, and how separated they are, get coffee spilled on it by 
> the Darwinian architect, and things get damn blury in those spots. lol

Heh. I was just thinking, you know... I've played with artificial neural 
networks. [Which, admittedly, are pretty *loosely* based on biological 
ones.] What the network does depends on how you train it. The same 
network can carry out basically any possible task given the right 
training, limited only by the number of neurons in the network. (That 
puts an upper limit on how complicated the possible tasks can be.) But 
human brains all seem to gravitate towards the exact same mode of 
functioning. So it can't be a "blank sheet" to start with. Some of it 
must be hard-wired somehow, otherwise each brain would configure itself 
in a random way.

BTW, I find it amusing how they figured out how the brain works. 
Apparently you can remove a living person's skull and prod their brain 
with a small electrode, and see what it does to them. 0_0 Apparently 
this isn't fatal, or even painful, since the brain itself is insensitive 
to pain. [Surely your skull would hurt though??] Who the **** 
volunteered for that one?!

(Perhaps it was the same person who volunveered for the study into the 
common cold. They took a control group, and a group who had their feet 
submerged in cold water for 4 hours a day. The latter group suffered 
from more colds than the control group. WHY WOULD YOU VOLUNTEER FOR 
THIS?!?!)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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