On 10/20/07, Matt Mahoney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [most of post snipped and agreed with]
> Without a number, you could argue that the vast majority of synapses store > subconscious (non recallable) memories. But I can still argue otherwise. > Humans are not significantly superior to other large animals with smaller > brains (such as a bear or a deer) in skills that don't involve language, such > as running over rough terrain or discriminating various plants and animals. As I understand it, this is not the case. Tests of throwing accuracy have put chimpanzees' typical error in feet in the same ballpark as humans' typical error in inches. (Some of this is mechanical - the arrangement of bones and muscles in the human arm trades off some strength for accuracy - but some of it is neural.) Humans distinguish a larger number of food and similar non-food plants and animals than any other species. Humans recognize a larger number of individuals in a social context than any other species. I don't have a reference handy, but someone once plotted a graph of brain size versus number of individuals recognized for various social animals - and found humans fall about where you'd expect on the graph given our brain size. Fossil evidence suggests the expansion of brain size in our ancestral line roughly coincides with toolmaking. Spoken language doesn't fossilize, so we're somewhat in the realm of conjecture here, but it has been at least plausibly reckoned that language came later. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=56204583-b479f2
