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Wisdom teeth

Dorfl

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Jun 19, 2005
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I remember learning in high school biology that every part of the body has a matching area in the brain, with a size roughly corresponding to the number of sensory nerves in that body part - so the scalp is just a tiny patch, the torso is fairly small, the fingertips are huge, etc. But how does that work for body parts that are only added later in life, e.g. wisdom teeth?

Is an area added for them, or is it taken from that of the other teeth, or does it work some other way?
 
Admittedly, this was from the same teacher as taught us that the tongue is divided into different areas for the basic four tastes, and that the eye sees an upside-down image that the brain then turns right, so maybe I should have been a bit more skeptical.

So what happens is basically that nerves in the gums are just rerouted to the teeth?
 
No, they're probably already there, along with all the other nerves for other teeth. They just haven't grown their teeth yet.

A few minutes of searching on Google should get it. Try "How do wisdom teeth grow and develop?"
 
First of all, it's over-simplified to divide the brain into zones just by the sensory inputs they serve. There are lobes wose function is one or two layers above, or which deal with stuff like fight-or-flight reflexes or whatnot.

Second, neurons can and routinely do take new functions, if needed. If you lose a bunch of brain matter from the part that, say, ought to deal with your right foot normally, another part of the brain can learn to do that function instead.

The most extreme case was that of a French civil servant who pretty much didn't have much brain left. Yet he could still function as a normal human. Admittedly an IQ 70 human, but nevertheless.

The brain is pretty much a self-organizing machine, and an amazing one at that. It can learn to deal with inputs or outputs that don't resemble anything it had to use before. E.g., the signals from a CCD camera sensor is _nothing_ like the pre-processed image from a normal retina, but there have been implants of such a CCD camera sensor in blind people and the brain eventually learns to "see" through it. E.g., I remember reading about an experiment where brain tissue from a rat learned to control a toy truck. It's nothing like a rat body, but the neurons will figure out how to use it anyway.

(Sadly I'm not allowed to post links to the BBC articles yet, to support that statement, but let's say it's a quick googling exercise if anyone is curious enough.)

What I'm getting at is that even if you didn't have the brain cells dedicated to wisdom teeth (e.g., because you had a mini-stroke in that part of the brain), some neurons from somewhere else could take over the function.
 
I googled a bit on how teeth are formed, but I could not find anything on exactly how the nerves are rerouted. But I guess it probably is like Hans says: Connections are grown between the teeth and the brain, and then the brain rewires itself - much by trial and error - to match the extra teeth.
 
Admittedly, this was from the same teacher as taught us that the tongue is divided into different areas for the basic four tastes, and that the eye sees an upside-down image that the brain then turns right, so maybe I should have been a bit more skeptical.

Both those things are correct (essentially)
 
Eeh... Only for a very broad definition of "essentially", I think. Her division of the tongue was definitely false http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_map. About the eye, I guess it's partly a question of semantics. The image is projected upside down on the retina, for sure, but that does not mean that the brain gets an "upside down" picture that it has to turn "the right way up", does it?
 
Eeh... Only for a very broad definition of "essentially", I think. Her division of the tongue was definitely false http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_map. About the eye, I guess it's partly a question of semantics. The image is projected upside down on the retina, for sure, but that does not mean that the brain gets an "upside down" picture that it has to turn "the right way up", does it?

I don't know what tongue map your teacher gave you, so I can't speak to that.

But yes, the brain does turn the image upside down.

There's a great experiment-
When people wear special glasses designed to flip their vision upside down, their brain responds by flipping the image back rightside up after a few days.

http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae353.cfm
 
The brain doesn't turn an image upside down or right side up. It simply takes the only image there is, the only one there's ever been. The top of the image does hit the bottom of the retina and the bottom of the image hits the top (and the same for right & left), but the brain has no particular reason to have ever assumed in the first place that input from the bottom of the retina must be the bottom of the picture, and so on. So as far as the brain is concerned, there was never an upside-down state to have to reverse.
 
Read Phantoms of the Brain and A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness.

This should give you an idea of what drives the location of the brain being associated with a body part. It is quite interesting, but I don't remember anything that has to do with teeth.

The bizarre thing about wisdom teeth is that it is an evolutionary throw back. Our jaws are getting smaller, and the teeth do not know it yet.

By the way, I only have 24 teeth. I had four teeth removed when I was in 4th grade to make room, and then my wisdom teeth removed in college because my jaw was too small.
 
I don't know what tongue map your teacher gave you, so I can't speak to that.

But yes, the brain does turn the image upside down.

There's a great experiment-
When people wear special glasses designed to flip their vision upside down, their brain responds by flipping the image back rightside up after a few days.

http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae353.cfm

There was a thread recently about the upsidedown vision glasses. It turns out most people DON'T experience the image flipping back to the right way up. They just get used to it being upsidedown to the point that they don't notice it any more and can move about as if it is right side up. As far as I understood it anyway.
 
There was a thread recently about the upsidedown vision glasses. It turns out most people DON'T experience the image flipping back to the right way up. They just get used to it being upsidedown to the point that they don't notice it any more and can move about as if it is right side up. As far as I understood it anyway.

When I was a kid, I had a friend who played video games with the joystick rotated 90 degrees. Up and down moved things left and right. He didn't even realize he did it. Human brains are pretty adaptive.

A similar thing happens to those who fly model airplanes. They are landed with the plane flying toward you. This reverses left and right controls for only the last few seconds of flying, but you quickly adapt to it.
 
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wisdom teeth are awfully painful. I'm 22 and mine have just started to come through. When food gets stuck in them, OUCH!
 
The brain doesn't turn an image upside down or right side up. It simply takes the only image there is, the only one there's ever been. The top of the image does hit the bottom of the retina and the bottom of the image hits the top (and the same for right & left), but the brain has no particular reason to have ever assumed in the first place that input from the bottom of the retina must be the bottom of the picture, and so on. So as far as the brain is concerned, there was never an upside-down state to have to reverse.
Yeah, that's what I was trying to say. It does simply not make sense to talk about the visual input being oriented any direction before being analysed by the brain. I probably should not have used the phrase "********" when my biology teacher said otherwise though...
 
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By the way, I only have 24 teeth. I had four teeth removed when I was in 4th grade to make room, and then my wisdom teeth removed in college because my jaw was too small.
I will probably need to have mine removed. It's not a good thing when you don't realize those bumps in your gums are wisdom teeth, because obviously no teeth could possibly come out at that angle :-/
 

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