Fascinating anecdote, and I'd love to see the report on this. I wonder what else they learned from such an interesting case study.
But I doubt it's 100% "no pre-wiring". What about gravity and musculature? Surely brains must know or train on these in some way before birth.
And what about fight or flight reflexes and presupposing monsters in the shadows? My understanding is that these had a primitive evolutionary basis and that we came hardwired to respond to certain stimuli.
Yeah - I just meant specifically 3D visual modeling. I think some fears are known to be innate among apes - fear of the dark, snakes, and falling. Also paying attention to faces?
The cataracts thing was an article I saw on HN a few years ago, but don’t remember the title.
> A NEUROLOGIST'S NOTEBOOK about Virgil (pseud.), who lost his eyesight as a child, and regained it at age 50. Tells how he could not adjust to the sighted world, and eventually had to be hospitalized.
Unfortunately, it needs a New Yorker account to view.
Gravity is probably also learned at the same time we learn how to use our muscles from how we must compensate for it when moving, also from seeing how things have a tendency to approach the ground unless something gets in the way, and from the sound things make when they hit the floor.
I don't think there's much opportunity to experience gravity before birth in order to train it, and I can't think of anything the brain would need to know about gravity beyond how we experience it with our senses.
> And what about fight or flight reflexes and presupposing monsters in the shadows? My understanding is that these had a primitive evolutionary basis and that we came hardwired to respond to certain stimuli.
Maybe pre-wired behaviors can depend on non-pre-wired stimuli, like a function that's conditioned on an undefined function and evaluates to false on exception.
But I doubt it's 100% "no pre-wiring". What about gravity and musculature? Surely brains must know or train on these in some way before birth.
And what about fight or flight reflexes and presupposing monsters in the shadows? My understanding is that these had a primitive evolutionary basis and that we came hardwired to respond to certain stimuli.