"I have heard more than one MD say she can't swallow......"
Umm, Ted, swallowing saliva is a basic, brain stem function. What the MDs are talking about is that she can't sequence between chewing, if that is stimulated, and swallowing what she chewed. If the cortex is gone, all that exist is basic functions. Moving from one state, like chewing, is not followed by another state, like swallowing. The sequencer is gone. That is what the MDs are talking about, and that is why this is a controversy at all. Because fairly complex events are handled at a low level, and can be triggered by random firings, a human can interpret these events as having some causation. When, in fact, there is none.
The brain is a pretty low bandwidth device. Things that occur on a millisecond timescale are invisible to it. Because even things that are physiological occur on a shorter timescale than that, things have to be very distributed. The cerebral cortex, which waves the baton, doesn't have much low level control unless it wants it. So there are a lot of mechanisms that control functions that the cerebral cortex doesn't want to worry about at a particular point in time. That is the trap we are seeing. |
