Quote of the Day: February 13, 2012
"A lesion in one spot leaves you unable to tell a Jack Russell from a badger (not that there is much difference), and with damage in another spot, the toaster is unrecognizable. There are even people with certain brain lesions who specifically cannot recognize fruit. Harvard researchers Alfonso Caramazza and Jennifer Shelton claim that the brain has specific knowledge systems (modules) for animate and inanimate categories that have distinct neural mechanisms. These domain-specific knowledge systems aren’t actually the knowledge itself, but systems that make you pay attention to particular aspects of situations, and by doing so, increase your survival chances. For example, there may be quite specific detectors for certain classes of predatory animals such as snakes and big cats. A stable set of visual clues may be encoded in the brain that make you pay attention to certain aspects of biological motion, such as slithering…"
--Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain
