Gryphon's Word of the Day, March 27, 2007

The word of the day1 for March 27, 2007 is “synapse” — noun : the point at which a nervous impulse passes from one neuron to another.

 

Hopefully, I never laughed at old people portrayed as absent-minded. Between the scientific explanation that the hormones that keep the synapses synapping diminish as we grow older, and the more comprehensible explanation that the brain is a finite space that at some point must lose old information to make way for new, there’s plenty of explanation for lost keys, lost memories, lost skills.

 

Jeanie complains that her synapses are not as synappy as they once were. After yesterday’s uproar about the missing suspenders, and my own lapses into incoherency in the face of reason, I think we’re all in trouble. My husband often accuses me of remembering everything. This may be true, but sometimes it takes a while to dredge the memory out of the archives. As long as I can remember more than he does, I figure I’m all right.

 

The quote2 for today is from John Searle (b. 1932), U.S. philosopher. “Is the Brain’s Mind a Computer Program?” Scientific American (January 1990):

One can imagine a computer simulation of the action of peptides in the hypothalamus that is accurate down to the last synapse. But equally one can imagine a computer simulation of the oxidation of hydrocarbons in a car engine or the action of digestive processes in a stomach when it is digesting pizza. And the simulation is no more the real thing in the case of the brain than it is in the case of the car or the stomach. Barring miracles, you could not run your car by doing a computer simulation of the oxidation of gasoline, and you could not digest pizza by running the program that simulates such digestion. It seems obvious that a simulation of cognition will similarly not produce the effects of the neurobiology of cognition.

;^)  Jan

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