🚀 go-pugleaf

Kevin Spencer (kspencer@iti.org) wrote:
: herwin@mason1.gmu.edu (HARRY R. ERWIN) writes:

: >Have there been any studies of the role of the maturity of the GABAergic
: >neurons of the association cortex in cortical functioning? An immature or
: >sparse system seems to be associated with particular ease in forming
: >activation networks involving diverse concepts ('you always have
: >interesting ideas'--the Feynman pattern), but also with generalized
: >anxiety syndrome and with poor capacity for dealing with social
: >interactions. Have there been corresponding studies of the inverse
: >condition--relatively dense development of the GABAergic system?

: Could you elaborate on the evidence for the association between the
: association cortex GABAergic neurons and "activation networks involving
: diverse concepts", etc.?  I am curious about how such data could have
: collected from what I assume were human subjects -- post-mortem, perhaps?

My guess is that he's talking about neural net programming, no
post-mortems required.  The request for an elaboration should still
hold though.

To be more specific, I'm wondering why the GABAergic neurons.  

Are they somehow different from the rest of the cortex?  I thought
that young children's cortex was far more dense than adults'.
Obviously, the morphological changes that occur during learning will
not have occurred (and may be what the original poster meant by
"immature") but I wonder if there is something special about the
GABAergic system that it should differ in changes in density (from low
to high rather than from high to low) and whether there are any other
reasons to suppose that learning (in the young?) might be strongly
associated with this system.

Also, why would learning involving clusters of diverse concepts,
anxiety syndrome, and social klutziness be associated (or is that
unimportant)?  

Thanks for any information,

Richard

beckwith@ils.nwu.edu