Statistics and the brain (1)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

11 April

On Lindsay's blog, another discussion about AI and virtual immortality.

In a side-strand, generated by comment, I have added:


If they do actually mean anything, and are not more inventions (which, however imaginative they may be, just mislead everybody), these statistics about, for example, how much of the brain we use are in the realm of science - but how good is the science, as, if it were crucial to making the right finding to have more of the scientist's brain working than 10%, then the measurements might be ones that defy or defeat the measurer.

An often-quoted one, and one used by those who like wearing hats to justify the preference, is the claim that - and I think that it is usually this sort of figure - 20% of heat lost by the body is through the head. To which I retort:

1. When someone inverted the figure, and made it 80% heat loss, I really had to question whether he ever engaged the brain before speaking;

2. If this is the loss from the head, and one wants to minimize it, a hat is clearly not the answer, where a balaclava is;

3. Maybe that's where the 10% usage of the brain comes from - it's overheating because of people trying to block its cooling system.


See more, if you will, at Writer's Rest...

And now, also, at Statistics and the brain (2)


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here