Ben Carson Just Got a Whole Lot Wrong About the Brain

[muriel_volestrangler]

It remembers everything you’ve ever seen. Everything you’ve ever heard. I could take the oldest person here, make a hole right here on the side of the head, and put some depth electrodes into their hippocampus and stimulate, and they would be able to recite back to you verbatim a book they read 60 years ago. It’s all there; it doesn’t go away. You just have to learn how to recall it. But that’s what your brain is capable of. It can process more than 2 million bits of information per second. You can’t overload it. Have you ever heard people say, “Don’t do all that, you’ll overload your brain.” You can’t overload the human brain. If you learned one new fact every second, it would take you more than 3 million years to challenge the capacity of your brain.

“It’s utter nonsense,” emailed Dan Simons, a psychologist at the University of Illinois who specializes in attention and memory. “We can’t recall extended text verbatim unless we deliberately memorized it for that purpose (certainly not books we happened to read 60 years ago), you can’t trigger accurate recall of detailed memories with an electrode (and long-term memories aren’t stored in the hippocampus), we don’t store a perfect and permanent record of our experiences (it’s not all there just waiting to be probed), and you can’t just ‘learn how to recall it.'”
...
Yeah, but what about the electrode thing? “To say that you could do that assumes that you know where you could actually find those memories, which we don’t know how to do,” Ramirez says. There are a lot of different kinds of memories—how to ride a bike versus your phone number versus where you were when you heard about 9/11—and while some of them hang out in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, the really permanent stuff seems not to rely on the hippocampus at all. That’s why people like Patient HM, a famous subject of memory research who had most of his hippocampus removed when he was a young man, could remember a lot of stuff about his childhood.

In a few cases, neurosurgeons have managed to get a patient to recall a memory by zapping the hippocampus with an electrode, but they can’t control it the way Carson suggests—if the memory of page 47 of Hamlet is even in there. “We’re barely able to activate fear or pleasure in an animal, let alone one among the constellation of memories that humans actually have,” Ramirez says.

Even if scientists could do it, they might not be getting an accurate memory. “Memory isn’t a videotape library. It’s a dynamic, adaptive system,” says John Coley, a cognitive scientist at Northeastern. “The way we encode and recall memories changes them. It may be ‘in there,’ but unless you use it, it can go away, and the way you use it can change it.”

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/ben-carson-just-got-whole-lot-wrong-brain/

Great. Even in the area he's meant to be an expert, he's dishing out dubious claims.

[Ilsa]

1. I wonder if he was sued (malpractice) into retirement. nt

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. Another thread said 8 times. Once left a sponge in a woman's brain. . . . nt

[Chemisse]

2. I'm starting to think he experimented on his own brain.

How can someone be brilliant enough to become a brain surgeon, yet seem so dumb?

[GWC58]

4. Most brilliant people, and Carson

is brilliant, lack common sense.

[WePurrsevere]

6. Ask nurses who have been around for a few years.

It's been almost 3 decades since I left nursing in frustration and then became a patient with a chronic illness (and then a co-full-time caregiver of in-laws) ready to smack the snot out of some doctors.

[n2doc]

8. Smart people can be nuts

I've known a few. Clearly Carson is one of them.

[VMA131Marine]

5. I think Dr Carson is on an extended acid trip

He certainly acts like it at times.

[milestogo]

7. Carson was a neurosurgeon - the brain was just a piece of meat

for him to carve up. He never knew what the brain was actually for.