The Birth of Tragedy |
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived … I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms..." (Walden, 1854). |
All anatomists at that time, and for decades prior to Mountcastle, recognized that the cortex looks similar everywhere; this is undeniable. And they did find differences. They assumed that if one region is used for language and another for vision, then there ought to be differences between those regions. If you look closely enough you find them… The situation is analogous to the work of biologists in the 1800s. They spent their time discovering the minute differences between species. Success for them was finding that two mice that looked nearly identical were actual separate species. For many years Darwin eventually had the big insight to ask how all these species could be so similar. It is their similarity that is surprising and interesting, much more so than their differences.
Mountcastle makes a similar observation. In a field of anatomists looking for minute differences in cortical regions, he shows that despite the differences, the neocortex is remarkably uniform. The same layers, cell types, and connections exist throughout It looks like the six business cards everywhere. The differences are often so subtle that trained anatomists can’t agree on them. Therefore, Mountcastle argues, all regions of the cortex are performing the same operation. The thing that makes the vision area visual and the motor area motoric is how the regions of cortex are connected to each other and to other parts of the central nervous system.
"<On intelligence> Jeff Hawkins with Sandra Blakeslee
