See?
No answers this week, just a question I find interesting.
In my reading recently I’ve come across the unsourced statistic that we use up to 80% of our brain for visual processing. Ignoring the weasel words “up to” and allowing that the number as it reached me is likely both inflated and broad in it’s definitions… I got to wondering.
Some other things that I’ve been taught all my life are that people without sight compensate by increased sharpness in their other senses, and that when parts of the brain are damaged other parts are able to reeducate themselves to pick up some of the slack. So it seems pretty obvious that that “up to 80%” gets bored when there’s no visual signal coming in and picks up whatever odd jobs it can find. That’s a potent lot of extra processing power, but that’s not where I’m going.
Another area that interests me is the effects of chemical substances on the human mind. Remember that the brain works by a combination of chemical interactions and electric signals and remember also that everything we think we know about the world outside of our bodies is actually filtered through those chemical and electrical signals.
Now you take those last two paragraphs together and you open huge cans of worms taken straight out of Pandora’s box, but, again, I’m going to ignore most of that.
What it came down to for me was simply, when a blind person takes a so-called hallucinogenic drug, some sort of psychotropic substance that messes with our visual processing, what does it do for or to them? Does the drug mess with a particular type of brain processing, so that the effect just isn’t there on the blind person, or does it mess with particular areas of the brain, so that it has some effect on the “alternative processing” that goes on in the brains of the sightless?
I tried asking God for insight, but he just told me if I cared all that much I could go to medical school and then become a research scientist and figure it out for myself. Needless to say, I’m interested, but I’m not that interested.
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