From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!unix.cis.pitt.edu!pitt!geb Wed Dec 18 16:02:38 EST 1991
Article 2234 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: geb@dsl.pitt.edu (gordon e. banks)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Scaled up slug brains
Message-ID: <12781@pitt.UUCP>
Date: 18 Dec 91 16:05:00 GMT
References: <45083@mimsy.umd.edu> <12773@pitt.UUCP> <45090@mimsy.umd.edu>
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Organization: Decision Systems Laboratory, Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA.
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In article <45090@mimsy.umd.edu> harwood@umiacs.umd.edu (David Harwood) writes:

>Call up NIH's center on stroke disorders, or McLean research institute
>in Boston, or NYU Medical School's neuroscience project involving
>special NMR imaging. (If you excise 60% of your left hemisphere,
>which is involved in language processing (among other things),
>except for areas B and W, you will not "proceed" as normal except
>to post to this newsgroup.

Will you get real?  Who said that the patient would proceed as normal?
How in the world would you ever tell what B & W were doing if they
are totally cut off from the rest of the brain?  No one said B & W
were the totality of language processing.  But small lesions there
can wipe out language and small lesions elsewhere cannot.  What is
your theory of what B & W are doing?


> Also, apes do not respond to novel verbal
>expressions with anything like attention, unless you are chewing
>on their banana. Infant children, on the other hand, will watch you
>talk and babble to themselves all day long ;-)

Apes do not have the amount of neural hardware devoted to language
that we do.  So what?  Who is disputing this?  But if you chew on
their banana, it will activate large areas of the brain.  All this
proves is that there are plentiful interconnections, nothing more.

-- 
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Gordon Banks  N3JXP      | "I have given you an argument; I am not obliged
geb@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu   |  to supply you with an understanding." -S.Johnson
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