“Real surprise”: Human brain’s right, left hemispheres connect – despite no corpus callosum
| October 20, 2011 | Posted by News under Neuroscience, News |
Normal vs. cc-absent brain - both synchronize activity/Caltech
In “Bridging the Gap” (Caltech, 10/10/11), we learn: “Caltech Neuroscientists Find Normal Brain Communication in People Who Lack Connections Between Right and Left Hemispheres.” Not in itself a new sort of find, by any means.
PASADENA, Calif.—Like a bridge that spans a river to connect two major metropolises, the corpus callosum is the main conduit for information flowing between the left and right hemispheres of our brains. Now, neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have found that people who are born without that link—a condition called agenesis of the corpus callosum, or AgCC—still show remarkably normal communication across the gap between the two halves of their brains.
Many have heard about Roger Sperry’s work with people whose brains were split to control life-threatening epilepsy, whose left hand really didn’t know that their right hand was doing. But the Caltech researchers studied people who had never had a functional corpus callosum, from the time of embryogenesis:
“This was a real surprise,” says Tyszka. “We expected to see a lot less coupling between the left and right brain in this group—after all, they are missing about 200 million connections that would normally be there. How do they manage to have normal communication between the left and right sides of the brain without the corpus callosum?”
What may have happened is that, never having been able to connect via the CC, the two halves of the brain simply use existing communication channels more intensely to stay connected. By contrast, Sperry’s split-brain subjects brains had adapted to communicating through the CC, but then it was severed. There is a practical side to this research:
“We are now examining AgCC subjects who are also on the autism spectrum, in order to gain insights about the role of brain connectivity in autism, as well as in healthy social interactions,” says Tyszka. “About a third of people with AgCC also have autism, and altered connectivity in the corpus callosum has been found in autism. The remarkable compensation in brain functional networks that we found here may thus have important implications also for understanding the function of the brains of people with autism.”
See also: Researchers “very shocked” by recent new genes that form distinctly human brain
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6 Responses to “Real surprise”: Human brain’s right, left hemispheres connect – despite no corpus callosum
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Well, cortical areas are connected by many routes, including cortical-subcortical loops, so it’s not that big a surprise that congenital absence of a corpus callosum would not necessarily prevent mature resting-state networks from developing (although you have to be a bit careful with fMRI data because what you are measuring is blood flow to a region following neural activity, not neural activity itself, and when a region in one hemisphere is active, it may induce blood flow to the homologous region in the other hemisphere). And in any case, as you say, it’s been known for a while that people with AgCC can be completely asymptomatic.
But interesting work, especially the implications for autism.
a few notes on the mind being independent of the brain:
Quantum non-locality is implicated in brain activity in the following study:
further notes:
‘Surprisingly’, at the molecular level, the cells of the brain are found to be extremely ‘plastic’ to changes in ‘activity in the brain’ which is, or course, completely contrary to the reductive materialistic view of the mind ‘emerging’ from the material brain;
Further notes:
This following experiment is really interesting:
I once asked a evolutionist, after showing him the preceding experiment, “Since you ultimately believe that the ‘god of random chance’ produced everything we see around us, what in the world is my mind doing pushing your god around?”
Here is a article and interview that is far more nuanced in the discerning of ‘transcendent mind’ from material brain than the brute empirics I’ve listed;
The article cited OP has nothing to do with whether the mind is independent of the brain. The brain’s plasticity is fundamental to how it works, and follows “Hebb’s rule”: what fires together wires together.
It isn’t “surprising” at all: it’s the basis of neuroscience, pretty well.
Actually I’ve found that nothing, absolutely nothing, no matter how surprising it is to the rest of us, is surprising to a committed materialist/atheist who religiously believes that the mind, with all its stunning ‘transcendent’ attributes (M. Egnor) simply ‘emerged’ from the brain!!! But, despite your protestations, this study actually fits very well with the other studies I listed and provides another ‘brick in the wall’ of evidence that supports the mind being independent of brain;
Further notes as to transcendence of the mind:
Here is the key experiment that led Wigner to his Nobel Prize winning work on quantum symmetries:
i.e. In the experiment the ‘world’ (i.e. the universe) does not have a ‘privileged center’. Yet strangely, the conscious observer does exhibit a ‘privileged center’. This is since the ‘matrix’, which determines which vector will be used to describe the particle in the experiment, is ‘observer-centric’ in its origination! Thus explaining Wigner’s dramatic statement, “It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”
Further weight for consciousness to be treated as a separate entity in quantum mechanics, and thus the universe, is also found in the fact that it is impossible to ‘geometrically’ maintain 3-Dimensional spherical symmetry of the universe, within the sphere of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, for each 3D point of the universe, unless all the ‘higher dimensional quantum information waves’ actually do collapse to their ‘uncertain 3D wave/particle state’, universally and instantaneously, for each point of conscious observation in the universe just as the experiments of quantum mechanics are telling us that they do. The 4-D expanding hypersphere of the space-time of general relativity is insufficient to maintain such 3D integrity/symmetry, all by itself, for each different 3D point of observation in the universe. The primary reason for why the 4D space-time, of the 3D universe, is insufficient to maintain 3D symmetry, by itself, is because the universe is shown to have only 10^79 atoms. In other words, it is geometrically impossible to maintain such 3D symmetry of centrality with finite 3D material resources to work with for each 3D point in the universe. Universal quantum wave collapse of photons, to each point of ‘conscious observation’ in the universe, is the only answer that has adequate sufficiency to explain the 3D centrality we witness for ourselves in this universe.
Experimental confirmation here:
Shoot there is even experimental confirmation that the preceding experimental finding will NEVER be overturned;
further notes:
i.e. The preceding experiment clearly shows that the detector is secondary in the experiment and that a ‘conscious observer’, being able to know the information of which path a photon takes with local certainty, is primary to the wave collapsing to a particle in the experiment. The act of a detector detecting a photon at an earlier time in the experiment does not determine if the wave will be collapsed at the end of the experiment. Only the availability of the information to the observer is what matters for the wave to collapse. That is what he meant by ‘we the observer are shocked to learn’
It is also very interesting to note that some materialists seem to have a very, very, hard time grasping the simple point of these extended double slit experiments, but to try to put it more clearly; To explain an event which blatantly defies time and space, as the quantum erasure experiment clearly does, you cannot appeal to any material entity in the experiment like the detector, or any other 3D material/physical part of the experiment, which is itself strictly constrained by the limits of time and space. To give an adequate explanation for defying time and space one is forced to appeal to a transcendent entity which is itself not constrained by time or space. But then again I guess I can see why forcing someone, who claims to be a atheistic materialist, to appeal to a non-material transcendent entity, to give an adequate explanation for such a ‘spooky’ event, would invoke such utter confusion on their part. Yet to try to put it in even more ‘shocking’ terms for the atheists, the ‘shocking’ conclusion of the experiment is that a transcendent Mind, with a capital M, must precede the collapse of quantum waves to 3-Dimensional particles. Moreover, it is impossible, with a capital I, for a human mind to ever ‘emerge’ from any 3-D material basis which is dependent on a preceding transcendent conscious cause for its own collapse to a 3D state in the first place. This is more than a slight problem for the atheistic-evolutionary materialist who insists that our minds simply ‘emerged’, or evolved, from 3D matter. In the following article Professor Henry puts it more clearly than I can:
further note:
There are a large number of genetic loci that can result in agenesis of the corpus callosum, and the agenesis is not always a complete absence. I don’t know whether they looked for complete absence of the structure or not. In evaluating these patients I would think that you have to consider the possibility that the genetic deficit could have other consequences on brain function than the effect on the corpus callosum. As usual, genetic syndromes are complicated.