HERE’S SOME MORE BASICS ON THE BRAIN
BY LEDA COSMIDES AND JOHN TOOBY

[OPEN QUOTE] Principle 1. The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.

The brain is a physical system whose operation is governed solely by the laws of chemistry and physics. What does this mean? It means that all of your thoughts and hopes and dreams and feelings are produced by chemical reactions going on in your head (a sobering thought). The brain's function is to process information. In other words, it is a computer that is made of organic (carbon-based) compounds rather than silicon chips. The brain is comprised of cells: primarily neurons and their supporting structures. Neurons are cells that are specialized for the transmission of information. Electrochemical reactions cause neurons to fire.

Neurons are connected to one another in a highly organized way. One can think of these connections as circuits -- just like a computer has circuits. These circuits determine how the brain processes information, just as the circuits in your computer determine how it processes information. Neural circuits in your brain are connected to sets of neurons that run throughout your body. Some of these neurons are connected to sensory receptors, such as the retina of your eye. Others are connected to your muscles. Sensory receptors are cells that are specialized for gathering information from the outer world and from other parts of the body. (You can feel your stomach churn because there are sensory receptors on it, but you cannot feel your spleen, which lacks them.) Sensory receptors are connected to neurons that transmit this information to your brain. Other neurons send information from your brain to motor neurons. Motor neurons are connected to your muscles; they cause your muscles to move. This movement is what we call behavior.

Organisms that don't move, don't have brains. Trees don't have brains, bushes don't have brains, flowers don't have brains. In fact, there are some animals that don't move during certain stages of their lives. And during those stages, they don't have brains. The sea squirt, for example, is an aquatic animal that inhabits oceans. During the early stage of its life cycle, the sea squirt swims around looking for a good place to attach itself permanently. Once it finds the right rock, and attaches itself to it, it doesn't need its brain anymore because it will never need to move again. So it eats (resorbs) most of its brain. After all, why waste energy on a now useless organ? Better to get a good meal out of it.

In short, the circuits of the brain are designed to generate motion—behavior—in response to information from the environment. The function of your brain—this wet computer—is to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances. [CLOSE QUOTE]

O’REILLY IS NOT ONE OF “THEM”

How many of you have watched “The Colbert Report” on the Comedy Central Network? In a current Newsweek (Feb. 13, 2006) article, O’Reilly, being his usually dense, pompous self, does not catch his own self-satire when he says of the satirist, “He [Colbert] does it [satirize O’Reilly] without being mean-spirited, which is a refreshing change. . . . Ninety percent of them are just vicious and they use their platform to injure people. . . .”

So who are the mean-spirited “them” who use their platform to injure people that O’Reilly is recognizing? It does take one to know one, doesn’t it?

MURDOCH IS NOT CHANGING CHANGING AT ALL!

Murdoch now owns “Myspace”, the Internet social networking portal. About his newly purchased clients who fear he may change their environment, Murdoch says, “They feel they own ‘Myspace’ and that the big corporation was going to come in and change it. Well, we haven’t.” A few lines before that, Murdoch said, “”We’ve also got a third of our force monitoring the site to prevent inappropriate material from being posted.” Yep, Big Murdoch is watching you peons.
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