Adam Marblestone: belief

Transcript context

…Or is the omnidirectional inference also something that took a while to unlock? I’m not sure that there’s agreement about that. I think there might be specific questions about language. Are there tweaks, whether that’s through auditory and memory, some combination auditory memory regions? There may also be macro-wiring where you need to wire auditory regions into memory regions or something like that, and into some of these social instincts to get language, for example, to happen. But that might also be a small number of gene changes to be able to say, “Oh, I just need from my temporal lobe over here, going over to the auditory cortex, something.” There is some evidence for the Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area. They’re connected with the hippocampus and so on and prefrontal cortex. So there’s like some small number of genes maybe for enabling humans to really properly do language. That could be a big one. But is it that something changed about the cortex and it became possible to do these things? Or is that that potential was already there, but there wasn’t the incentive to expand that capability and then use it, wire it to these social instincts and use it more? I would lean somewhat toward the latter. I think a mouse has a lot of similarity in terms of cortex as a human. Although there’s Suzana Herculano-Houzel‘s work on how the number of neurons scales better with weight with primate brains than it does with rodent brains. So does that suggest that there actually was some improvement in the scalability of the cortex?…

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