Marcus, Gary (b. 1970)

The Birth of the Mind

New York

Basic Books

2004

"Nature provides a first draft, which experience revises."

A whole raft of more recent studies points in the same direction. Nature provides a first draft, which experience revises. Neuroscientists Jonathan Horton and David Hocking showed that in primates, ocular dominance columns actually form in the dark of the womb. German researchers Imke Gödecke and Tobias Bonhoeffer raised kittens in such a way that both eyes would have experience--but not at the same time. When one eye could see, the other was sutured shut, and vice-versa. If experience were doing all of the work in fine-tuning the visual cortex, one might expect that the organization of the "orientation maps" of the two eyes (brain circuits that process the orientation of lines) would be different, reflecting the likely differences in experience between the two eyes. But Gödecke and Bonhoeffer found that the organization of the two brain maps was essentially identical.
(p. 34)

Writing::First Draft

Cited in Jonathan Haidt's TED talk. <Link>

Marcus, Gary F. The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought. New York: Basic Books, 2004. <Link to Google Books>

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04/09/2009