You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (106)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: V_V 18 December 2012 03:40:45PM 6 points [-]

The brain has redundancy at the level of neurons: it is quite resilient against diffuse neuron loss, and in case of localized damage, unless the affected area is large or includes key regions such as the brainstem, impairment is often limited to one or a few functions, and in some cases it even reorganizes to transfer the lost functions to other areas, partially recovering them.

However, there is no expectation that the brain has redundancy against the loss of an information storage medium that is used in all neurons.

If you destroy half of your collection of DVDs, the information in the other half is still intact. If you destroy every odd-numbered track on all of your DVDs, instead, most of the remaining data will be too fragmentary to be of any use, even if the number of bits you destroyed is the same in both cases.

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.