Borg Bandwidth

How large bandwidth is needed? We can estimate a lower bound from the bandwidth of speech and body language, which appears to be on the order of 10-100 bits/s. A highest upper bound would be total interconnection at the same signal density as the human mind, or roughly 10^18 bits/s, quite an extreme range. However, the two human hemispheres communicate closely through the corpus callosum normally with no discernible differences; this connection has a theoretical bandwidth on the order of 10^1...

 Practicing Motor Skills

In fact, babies do improve their motor skills much as adults do—as a result of diligent practice. New skills, such as walking independently, don't suddenly emerge out of nowhere but gradually build out of prior, simpler abilities—kicking, standing, and walking with support—after weeks or months of trying. The only difference between infant and adult motor learning (aside from the fact that infants seem to crave the exercise more than most of us) is that babies can train themselves in a ...

 The laryngeal nerve's haphazard course through the body

A favourite example, ever since it was pointed out to me by Professor J. D. Currey when he tutored me as an undergraduate, is the recurrent laryngeal nerve.* It is a branch of one of the cranial nerves, those nerves that lead directly from the brain rather than from the spinal cord. One of the cranial nerves, the vagus (the name means 'wandering' and it is apt), has various branches, two of which go to the heart, and two on each side to the larynx (voice box in mammals). On each side of the n...

 An Experiment With a Tadpole's Development

An early classic experiment by the Nobel Prize-winning embryologist Roger Sperry illustrates the principle perfectly. Sperry and a colleague took a tadpole and removed a tiny square of skin from the back. They removed another square, the same size, from the belly. They then regrafted the two squares, but each in the other's place: the belly skin was grafted on the back, and the back skin on the belly. When the tadpole grew up into a frog, the result was rather pretty, as experiments in embryo...