Sublime

Stephen Jay Gould,

the likely physiological basis of our ancestors’ first reading of tokens was a tiny new circuitry connecting the angular gyrus region with a few nearby visual areas and if Dehaene is correct, a few parietal areas involved in numeracy and occipital-temporal areas involved in object recognition

We have begun the process of revealing how the mind works and raised the possibility that your thoughts are not you.

Hebb’s Law: “Neurons that fire together wire together.” Repeating a habit leads to clear physical changes in the brain. In musicians, the cerebellum—critical for physical movements like plucking a guitar string or pulling a violin bow—is larger than it is in nonmusicians. Mathematicians, meanwhile, have increased gray matter in the inferior parieta

This result directly validates a key prediction of the neuronal recycling hypothesis—the acquisition of a novel skill does not require a radical rewriting of cortical circuits as if they were a blank slate, but merely a repurposing of their existing organization.

Studies that suggest a “brain spot for X” are typically misleading because mental functions are rarely localized to one place in the brain.