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From: mmm@cup.portal.com (Mark Robert Thorson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,sci.psychology,alt.cyberpunk
Subject: Re: Fluid vs. Crystallized Intelligence
Message-ID: <36099@cup.portal.com>
Date: 20 Nov 90 18:43:01 GMT
References: <36059@cup.portal.com> <1990Nov19.220725.349@ingres.Ingres.COM>
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> appear.  You believe that, don't you?  No?  Then why
> do you persist in claiming that neurons have ideas?

I thought I was careful to use the term "agent" when talking
about individual particles of intelligence.  This could be a
higher-level entity than a neuron.  As an analogy, the
gates and flip-flops of a computer are not made from individual
transistors -- they are clusters of transistors, each serving
a different function within the unit.  Likewise, I think that the
different types of cells in the cerebral cortex may serve specialized
functions in the complexes of cells which are the atoms of intelligence.
If 1 agent == 1 neuron, it would be more likely that the cortex would
be composed of a single cell type, which it is not.

Another piece of evidence supporting the 1 agent = many neurons concept
is the structure of the cerebellum.  This organ is a repeat
structure of the same complex of neurons across its entire surface.
I forget the number of neurons in the complex, but I think it's about 15.

There's a hierarchy of structure to the human brain, which is mostly
unrecognized due to the profound influence of the Golgi stain on
neurophysiology.  The Golgi stain is a technique for visualizing individual
nerve cells in a tissue.  For unknown reasons, the Golgi stain only
affects about one cell in a thousand -- seemingly a cell picked at random.
This makes the cells more visible, because the darkly-stained cell
stands out against the mostly-colorless unstained cells.
This allowed the early neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal to produce
his stunning series of drawings describing most of the major cell types
in the nervous system.  These drawings not only appear in many texts,
but have influenced succeeding generations of anatomical illustrators
and photographers.  It has programmed an unconscious bias.  A drawing or
a photo that doesn't look like a Cajal drawing looks subtly wrong.

Unfortunately the Golgi stain has exerted a bias on our view of the
brain.  We know a lot about the individual cell structures, but the
intermediate-level structures are completely invisible to Golgi staining.
It's as though the only way to look at a tree is to cut down the neighboring
forest for the radius of a mile.