Synapse efficiency diverges due to synaptic pruning following over-growth

In the development of the brain, it is known that synapses are pruned following over-growth. This pruning following over-growth seems to be a universal phenomenon that occurs in almost all areas -- visual cortex, motor area, association area, and so on. It has been shown numerically that the synapse efficiency is increased by systematic deletion. We discuss the synapse efficiency to evaluate the effect of pruning following over-growth, and analytically show that the synapse efficiency diverges as O(log c) at the limit where connecting rate c is extremely small. Under a fixed synapse number criterion, the optimal connecting rate, which maximize memory performance, exists.Comment: 15 pages, 16 figure

Axiomatic: Constituting ‘transexuality’ and trans sexualities in medicine

© 2018, The Author(s) 2018. This article argues that medicine misunderstands the necessarily complex ways trans people experience sexuality. Despite revisions to treatment guidelines and diagnostic descriptions, transgender medicine continues to be based on a paradigmatic narrative of ‘being born in the wrong body’. This narrative performatively reproduces sex, gender and ‘gender dysphoria’ as static, predetermined and independent of medical encounters. It also constructs trans sexualities as limited by and dependent on gender/genital ‘alignment’, which necessarily neglects many trans people’s sexual lives. By mobilising critiques of singularity from science and technology studies (STS), which emphasise how discourses and practices produce both what is knowable and materially possible, this article explores how medicine understands and constitutes ‘transexuality’ as a singular phenomenon that limits trans sexualities. By analysing contemporary medical guidebooks alongside the foundational text of trans medical treatment – Harry Benjamin’s (1999 [1966]) The Transsexual Phenomenon – I argue that medicine constitutes transexuality and understands trans sexualities via four axioms: 1) Transexuality is a disjuncture between mind and body; 2) Transexuality is hating having the wrong genitals; 3) Transexuality is painful and debilitating; and 4) Transexuality is resolvable with hormonal and surgical body modifications. In so doing, medicine flattens out the complexities of trans people’s experiences of gender and sexuality, and simultaneously disavows many trans people’s sexual lives