Millions of years ago our antecedents had a massive sacrifice of their left hemisphere.
We lost a lot of short term memory and replaced it with Broca’s, Wernicke & the phonological loop.
But why?
So we can—talk.
Thus chimpanzees can do this—we can’t:
https://x.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1984836325032542342
“Is your brain necessary?”
In 1980 Science magazine published this after researchers found people with almost no brain material—living a normal life [1].
This man lost half his brain and he lives a normal life. The video is shocking.
HE LOST NO MEMORIES.
We are yet to even understand in a minimal way human memory and intelligence really operate, where it truly comes from and even where it is stored. In the 1921 Dr. Wilder Penfield presented convincing evidence that memories were stored in specific locations in the brain or engrams. Penfield performed surgery on epileptic patients and found that when he stimulated the temporal lobes, the patients relived experiences from the past.
He found that whenever he stimulated a specific region of the brain, it evoked the same memory. This set the explanation that is still taught today and is likely what you learned even if you are a neurosurgeon.
In an effort to verify Dr. Penfield’s experiments, biologist Dr. Karl Lashley in 1950 began searching for the elusive engrams. He had trained rats in maze-running abilities and then attempted to surgically remove the portion of the rat’s brains (sorry, this is what he did) that contained the maze-running knowledge.
Dr. Lashley found that no matter what portion of the brain he removed, the rats retained their maze-running knowledge. Even when massive portions of the brain were removed, the rats were still able to navigate through the maze. Dr. Penfield was intrigued but horrified and delayed publishing his work because he knew it was heretical and he would be deem a Charlatan. He published his work and he was, of course, called a Charlatan.
Dr. Karl Pribram in 1969, a student of Dr. Penfield, was astonished by Dr. Lashley’s research. Dr. Pribram was successful in duplicating Lashley’s work and noticed that when brain-injured patients had large sections of their brain removed, they did not suffer a loss of any specific memories. Instead, the patient’s memory became increasingly hazy as greater portions of the brain were removed. Further research of Dr. Penfield’s experiments could be only duplicated on epileptic patients because of ethical reasons.
He was only performing tests as he helped epileptic patients with live brain surgery to help with their brain issues, along the way he was able to see some memories fade slightly.
Dr. Pribram knew that certain parts of the brain performed specific functions, yet the actual processing of the information seemed to be carried out by something that was not particular to any group of cells. Dr. Pribram observed memories were not localized at specific brain sites but distributed throughout the brain as a whole.
By 1977 Dr. Pribram came to the same conclusion as Lashley, that memories are not localized in any specific brain cells, but rather, memory seemed to be distribution throughout the whole brain. The problem was that there was simply no known mechanism that would explain how this was possible.
Dr. Pribram remained puzzled until he saw an old mid 1960’s article in Scientific American describing the construction of laser hologram. He immediately synthesized the information and hypothesized that the mind itself was operating in a holographic manner.
We don’t understand the brain to any real degree. We don’t understand where intelligence comes from. Where it is held. Where it goes when you pass.
Yet today there are folks that demand that you accept they know what Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is and that it is “dangerous”.
Start with defining human intelligence first.
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