Re-Frame of Mind: Do Our Brains Have a Built-in Sense of Grammar?
taylorvich writes:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-01-mind-brains-built-grammar.html
For centuries, a prevailing theory in philosophy has asserted that at birth the human mind is a blank slate. More recently, the same notion has also held sway in the field of neurobiology, where it is commonly held that neural connections are slowly created from scratch with the accumulation of sensory information and experience.
Eventually, the theory goes, this allows us to create memories in space and time and to then learn from those experiences.
But after spending more than a decade studying activity in the hippocampus, the area of brain which forms memory, Yale's George Dragoi began to have his doubts.
In his research on the hippocampus of rodents, Dragoi, an associate professor of psychiatry and of neuroscience, has found that early in life there emerge in this part of the brain individual functional clusters of cells (and, soon after, short sequences of cells) that predictably will be activated by new experiences. Within days of birth, he found, these cells, clusters, and short sequences become the foundation for increasingly complex sequences of cell assemblies that allow for the creation of memories.
In a new article published in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dragoi makes the case that the human brain also develops a cellular template soon after birth which defines who we are and how we perceive the world. He describes it as "the generative grammar" of the brain.
"Neurons organize like letters, then words, then sentences and paragraphs which allow for the internalization of the outside world," Dragoi said. "The brain has its own built-in sense of grammar."
The idea, he admits, runs counter to the tenets of empiricism, a centuries-old theory that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience. It also contradicts widely held assumption by life scientists that environmental stimuli will entirely dictate how the brain processes and stores information.
Journal Reference:
Dragoi, G. The generative grammar of the brain: a critique of internally generated representations. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 25, 60-75 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-023-00763-0
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