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Kawoomba comments on Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: bekkerd 09 May 2012 03:17PM

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Comment author: Kawoomba 18 December 2012 03:44:54PM 2 points [-]

The brain has redundancy at the level of neurons: it is quite resilient against diffuse neuron loss

Depends on what axis of resilience (as you alluded to).

For memory, confer grandmother cells.

Comment author: V_V 18 December 2012 04:55:31PM 1 point [-]

A neuron for Halle Berry, for example, might respond "to the concept, the abstract entity, of Halle Berry", and would fire not only for images of Halle Berry, but also to the actual name "Halle Berry".[15] However, there is no suggestion in that study that only the cell being monitored responded to that concept, nor was it suggested that no other actress would cause that cell to respond (although several other presented images of actresses did not cause it to respond).

Comment author: Kawoomba 18 December 2012 05:29:48PM 1 point [-]

That wiki article looks dated. See these two, more recent abstracts: [1], [2].

Anyways, the point isn't whether there are actual grandmother cells, or "merely" a very small number of cells serving the same purpose. It is that there are crucial brain functions with little to no redundancy.

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