All, I caught a episode of Charlie Rose's special Brain Series last night titled Social Brain. It's a roundtable discussion with researchers from a wide variety of areas presenting and discussing their findings related to the brain. A couple on interesting points bearing on this thread.
One was a genetics researcher studying tiny soil worms that eat bacteria. The worms exhibit a behavior they just couldn't figure out. For some reason on a regular basis the worms would clump up together in an knot and squirm around each other. But not all worms, just most. By marking them it was clear that they split into two groups. Those that regularly exhibited this behavior and those that seldom or rarely did. They eliminated physical characteristic, sex, food, disease, and every other thing they could think of and finally were left with "it must in some way be social" They did genetic testing a sure enough they found a difference in one gene that is thought to have some relationship to social behavior in other species. Then an Italian researcher studying similarities between monkey and human brains found a similar area in both humans and monkeys that mirror each other's activities. He thinks it help in reading the intentions of others and learning social skills. Electrodes are tuned to single cell activities in both a monkey and man. When one or the other makes a motion, moving an apple to one's mouth, the cell firing in the one moving and the one watching nearly simultaneously fire in nearly identical patterns. And it works both ways man mirrors monkey, monkey mirrors man. He thinks this could also help prepare children to speak. Baby watches, while brain is internally mirroring, mother speaking. Eventual all this internal mimicking may set up patterns for vocal and facial muscles to duplicate later. Ve..rrrry interesting. Dave Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
