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The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior

Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris

Comments on Current Events: Saturday, January 8, 2005

Early Learning Has Lasting Effects (HealthDay, Mon Dec 20, 2004) (link retired)

MONDAY, Dec. 20 (HealthDayNews) -- In a finding that offers insights into how young children learn language, researchers have discovered the early learning experiences of owls forever alter their brain circuitry.

The mistakes in this opening sentence are repeated and repeated throughout medical discourse and I am forced to repeat myself in order to address the problem: all learning changes brain circuitry. The brain is more flexible at an early age than it is at an older age with every nervous system of every animal. The brain learns itself into its shape. Every brain has more choices of how it develops and of what it can accomplish early in life than later in life. Memories are not erased as the parts of thinking are broken up into extremely small units. Later memories just use the common units of earlier memories or earlier subject matter or the common units of other functions. If you force a brain into changing the nature of the information being responded to, it can handle such a change (early in life, less so later in life) and once that brain has handled any change it can handle it later as well (with reduction in such ability increasing with age or time separated from the removed environment).

This opening paragraph of this press release indicates the assumption that “brain circuitry” is a different thing than “brain learning.” This assumption is wrong. It is an assumption that is based on the notion that genetic information is micro-managing the exact wiring of the brain when the brain is actually wiring itself according to mathematic principles in response to patterns/information with this mathematics creating the complexity of the wiring/connectivity and different weights/settings of that connectivity. (Genetics does none of that wiring but only tinkers with the body environment to which that mathematics is responding.)

Young barn owls are very good at identifying the source of a sound -- they have to be to hunt and survive. But can they compensate if their ability to locate sounds is altered?

Stanford University researchers found they can -- by creating new pathways in the brain that allow the animals to locate sounds even when their visual perception is changed.

As the birds became adults, they reverted to their normal brain pathway -- a connection of brain cells called neurons -- to locate sounds. But when their vision was temporarily altered again, they were able to switch to the alternate pathway that had been created when they were young.

It is necessary to muck around some very bad writing (logically) to distill the problems in this type of press release.

Obviously they are trying to make a point about a preconceived conclusion having to do with language development in humans (probably to increase the likelihood of funding for this study). They do this by emphasizing that the change being measured in the owls has to do with auditory processing when the experiment involves distortion of the visual field alone. This is not a big point though because the brain involves all the senses always and involves many realms of thinking to do anything so any change to vision will have an effect on higher levels of auditory and every other kind of processing as well. (For instance, changes in the motor response to visual fields also implies that the change is a motor change, but this press release is focusing on auditory changes in “brain circuitry” as it is written so there is some kind of political slanted science in the way this material is presented.)

"The main issue in this study is how the brain learns from experience," said lead researcher Eric Knudsen, chairman of the neurobiology department at Stanford University's School of Medicine. "We hypothesized that the change was an anatomical change."

This quote by Knudsen is idiotic to me. I can't help but insult it. Almost every study of almost everything in this realm of the brain and animal function comes up with the same hypothesis as if it is a big discovery, but a big discovery in some narrow focus of some part of the body/brain at some stage of development in some animal and then there is this big announcement that an anatomical change occurs with learning. ALL LEARNING IS ANATOMICAL CHANGE. It is time that science learned this concept and stopped parsing out this concept as applied to the infinity of different subsets of function and development that are studied in the science of narrow focus with no clearly understood overriding principles or theories.

The findings appear in the Dec. 19 online issue of Nature Neuroscience.

"The impact of early learning in the owls is very reminiscent of language learning in human infants," said Patricia K. Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington.

"My studies show that early experience with a language commits brain tissue to the acoustic patterns of that language. And this early learning affects future learning," Kuhl said.

In these preceding paragraphs they tell you how to interpret the study according to the realm of language as if it is a fact that understanding of language development is the obvious realm to benefit from this study. But it is the flexibility of all learning (especially visual learning) that is really examined here. It is as if they are trying to hide the incredible flexibility of the brain in all realms in order to hold onto the concept of genetics shaping the different brains with language being some kind of exception to the rule of their concept of genetic preordained design.

In the owl experiments, Knudsen and his colleagues placed glasses over the young owls' eyes, shifting the perception of where sounds were coming from. "We changed the relationship between what the owl hears and where he thinks the sound came from," Knudsen said.

They only changed the visual information. The sense of direction coming from sound only was not changed. This is bad logic.

Over several weeks, the owls were able to adjust what they heard to match their optically altered world. "We saw the architecture of neurons systematically altered by this juvenile experience," Knudsen said.

When the glasses were removed, the owls went back to using the normal sensory pathway, he noted.

However, as adults, the owls were able to use the alternate neuron pathway when their eyes were covered again with the glasses. But, adult owls that had their eyes covered with glasses for the first time weren't able to compensate for the visual and auditory mismatch, Knudsen explained.

They don't explain a full examination of such an experiment in this article. Very important to the intepretation of such an experiment is the experiment that shows how an owl that has the visual field distorted with glasses from early age until that later age will have lost what is described here as the “normal sensory pathway.” If both ways of presenting visual information are learned at an early age, then both will be there to some extent at an older age. But if only one way of presenting visual information is available throughout development, then that will be the “normal” visual information and no other will be possible. (This has been examined in other studies so this is not really a prediction.)

"These architectural changes in the brain are very persistent and persist into adulthood, and can be re-expressed if it becomes useful," Knudsen said. "Parts of the brain that are learning fundamental things about the world are being altered structurally in ways that are going to influence how they [the owls] process information in adulthood, and therefore have long-term implications for cognitive abilities and social capabilities."

The same is true for children, Kuhl said.

"It's as though you've got real estate in the brain that gets dedicated to one activity, and thereafter reinforces other things involving that activity, while at the same time inhibiting the learning of activities that are incompatible with the initial one," Kuhl said.

"If you learn the sounds of one language, which you do by 12 months of age -- like English, where 'r' and 'l' are used to create distinct words -- and then you try and learn Japanese where these two sounds are not distinct, your brain has a hard time having it both ways," she explained.

"However, in early development, before the real estate in the brain is committed, you actually can have it both ways. "We think two independent circuits get wired, one for each language," Kuhl said.

Apparently these researchers went into this study with an interest in language as the purpose. But they studied vision and not hearing or speech. They are presenting evidence that supports my theory, but they are interpreting it narrowly and narrowly interpreted to imply discovery in the wrong realm of nervous processing. (Strange contortion of data for an agenda of some kind.)

After puberty, it's much tougher to dedicate circuits to a completely new language, Kuhl said. "We're trying to understand how this works, and we think that early learning drives the process. Even small amounts of early language exposure make a difference."

Once again, let me repeat my first point: the nervous system can do anything with enough cells at an early age responding to signals that can present patterns for the cells to recognize and wire themselves in response. These scientists have an agenda to explain how language is easier to learn when young, but they don't notice how universal this change in ability to learn from youth to elderly is in all realms of nervous processing. The brain is better able to adapt to insults at an early age. (Even though early insults have a greater effect on changes in outcome of the shape and function of an animal, the brain of the young is better able to make logical the function of any change then. For instance, an accident or operation could change the organization of a body from normal, but the young will have an easier time operating that new configuration of body than the old but as the young are still growing the insult could cause a greater change in the nature of how the body looks later in life.) The young have more plastic brains and in every realm the brain deals with. To attribute the development of pathways at an early age only to the realm of language is to miss the boat about the brain and miss the boat about how language is possible and miss the boat about the universals of how language is the same across cultures (to find another explanation other than a “language module” which the owl would not have anyway).

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