31–40 of 209 posts
> It seems weird to have a whole separate organ for “make motor and cognitive skills work somewhat better.” Does it? I’d think this was an absolute gimme.
There is a second kidney, lung, eye etc, but a hot spare isn’t quite the same as a completely different structure.
> The cerebellum has a repeated, almost crystal-like neural structure: As a software engineer who did neurosurgery residency, my intuition/guess is that the cerebellum is kind of like the FPGA of the brain. The cerebrum is great for doing very complicated novel tasks, but it takes time and energy. The cerebellum on the other hand is specialized in being able to encode common tasks so it can do them with quickly and e…
> So you could end up with a person who would think that he had never seen a basketball hoop or basketball before but could be doing layups, dunks, and 3 pointers with ease. I know a lot of people with the opposite problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am way more interested in how you gave up $800,000+ a year to do software engineering.
Obviously not OP and not in this position, but I have worked with people who left surgical training positions and their reasons were health and a realisation that they would miss every family milestone, never get a real break and have every part of their life revolve around their job with the money and god-like power not compensating for that. Obviously that’s one side of the equation, I don’t have any surgeon friend…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a great comment, seriously. It just made me start thinking and then I realized perhaps another analogy is a just in time compiler where code or skills used often enough, your body manages to compile into native neurological code and stores that appropriately.
It is always funny to see brain metaphors morph to resemble our current stage of technological development, as the years go by. First it was anima, or hydraulic analogies of spirits and fluid moving through the body. Then it was clocks, the mechanistic processes of the brain. And so on and so on until today we metaphorize the brain to be like computer hardware. In vogue as well is comparing it to neural networks, due…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am way more interested in how you gave up $800,000+ a year to do software engineering.
Obviously not OP and not in this position, but I have worked with people who left surgical training positions and their reasons were health and a realisation that they would miss every family milestone, never get a real break and have every part of their life revolve around their job with the money and god-like power not compensating for that. Obviously that’s one side of the equation, I don’t have any surgeon friend…
Though some people are less burdened by golden handcuffs and sunk-cost fallacy
Plus, I've never met a happy (or sane) neurosurgeon
This is pretty widespread in controls, actually. The dominant control technique for legged robotics is model-predictive control ("MPC") which explicitly uses such a predictive model to determine the best inputs to the actuators.
> It seems weird to have a whole separate organ for “make motor and cognitive skills work somewhat better.” Does it? I’d think this was an absolute gimme.
Do we have other examples of this? There is a second kidney, lung, eye etc, but a hot spare isn’t quite the same as a completely different structure.
Or a tail, an entire extra limb just to keep balance a bit better.
Or ears, you can hear without them but they help capture sound a bit better.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/16/3927897...
> The cerebellum has a repeated, almost crystal-like neural structure: As a software engineer who did neurosurgery residency, my intuition/guess is that the cerebellum is kind of like the FPGA of the brain. The cerebrum is great for doing very complicated novel tasks, but it takes time and energy. The cerebellum on the other hand is specialized in being able to encode common tasks so it can do them with quickly and e…
I am way more interested in how you gave up $800,000+ a year to do software engineering.
Seems perfectly reasonably to switch to a lower stress career at some point.