Barry Bayliss wrote:
> 2) The 'association cortex' is not identical in everybody. Even the
> position of
> the motor cortex can vary up to a few centimeters [1]. There are
> differences
> in association cortex mapping for males and females, which I have
> seen is not
> a general statement. (if you require references I can dig some out).
Consider, for instance, the competitive filling-in that occurs when,
because of an injury that's sustained, a sensory cortical loses it's
afferents...
...an analogous occurrence of the same competitive "gilling-in" occurs
within organically-intact brains during the course of ordinary
experience... beyone genetic uniqueness, to the degree that males & females
experience differently, male-female differences are to be expected as a
result of these normal neural "competitions"...
...the important thing is that the "competition" is "just" another
manifestation of TD E/I minimization... if, for instance, an individual
responds "incorrectly" to a stimulus set, the environment in which the
individual exists will "impose a penalty" in the form of noxious
stimulation... simply by virtue of the relatively-diffuse fashion in which
fibers carrying noxious stimulation are mapped, the noxious stimulation
constitutes TD E/I(up) stimulation... so, since the system always strives
to achieve =long term= TD E/I(min), the system will reconfigure itself
internally so that the sensory portion of the activation state which
was correlated with the onset of the noxious stimulation is inhibited...
when it's inhibited, it atrophies relative to that which is less inhibited...
...and so forth... even in the developmental wiring up of the fetal nervous
system... (more if you like... ie how the internal reconfiguration is,
itself, guided via TD E/I minimization) ken
