Dennett:

Mike Merzenich sutured a monkey's fingers together so that it didn't need as much cortex to represent two separate individual digits, and pretty soon the cortical regions that were representing those two digits shrank, making that part of the cortex available to use for other things. When the sutures were removed, the cortical regions soon resumed pretty much their earlier dimensions. If you blindfold yourself for eight weeks, as Alvaro Pascual-Leone does in his experiments, you find that your visual cortex starts getting adapted for Braille, for haptic perception, for touch.

The way the brain spontaneously reorganizes itself in response to trauma of this sort, or just novel experience, is itself one of the most amazing features of the brain, and if you don't have an architecture that can explain how that could happen and why that is, your model has a major defect. I think you really have to think in terms of individual neurons as micro-agents, and ask what's in it for them?

Why should these neurons be so eager to pitch in and do this other work just because they don't have a job? Well, they're out of work. They're unemployed, and if you're unemployed, you're not getting your neuromodulators. If you're not getting your neuromodulators, your neuromodulator receptors are going to start disappearing, and pretty soon you're going to be really out of work, and then you're going to die.

I hadn't thought about any of this-- I thought the hard problem of brains was that dendrites grow so that neurons aren't arranged in a static map. Apparently that is just one of the hard problems.

He also discusses the question of how much of culture is parasitic, that philosophy has something valuable to offer about free will (I don't know what he has in mind there), the hard question of how people choose who to trust and why they're so bad at it (he thinks people chose their investment advisers more carefully than they chose their pastors, I suspect he's over-optimistic), and a detailed look at Preachers Who Are Not Believers. That last looks intriguing-- part of the situations is that preachers have been taught it's very bad to shake someone else's faith, so there's an added layer of inhibition which keeps preachers doing their usual job even after they're no longer believers themselves.