pinker preaches it

stephen pinker responds to the question, "what do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?":

At the level of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, critics have pointed to the apparent homogeneity of the cerebral cortex and of the seeming interchangeability of cortical tissue in experiments in which patches of cortex are rewired or transplanted in animals. I believe that the homogeneity is an illusion, owing to the fact that the brain is a system for information processing. Just as all books look the same to someone who does not understand the language in which they are written (since they are all composed of different arrangements of the same alphanumeric characters), and the DVD's of all movies look the same under a microscope, the cortex may look homogeneous to the eye but nonetheless contain different patterns of connectivity and synaptic biases that allow it to compute very different functions.

few truer works have been spoken about neuroscience in quite a while, in my humble opinion. it's food for thought- neuroscientists should be humbled by how little they really know. i think pinker gets it right here that it's not necessarily the parts, but the connectivity between parts, that is key to the emergent properties of the mind. his answer points to network theory.

but this seems a redundant question - asking scientists what they cannot prove. i'd argue that most of the people on this list fill books and papers full of things they believe but cannot prove. we all have faith in what we hope for, and certainty in what we do not see. such is the nature of the scientific method, is it not?

thanks to jacob and marginal revolution for the link to the world quesiton center.

Labels: neuroscience