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What does the cerebellum do?

sarahconstantin.substack.com

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Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#51

Post by LoganDark »

jbandela1 wrote: post #4

> 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…

Do you think this could be responsible for some part of "muscle memory"? Sometimes when I switch to other identities (DID), they can forget steps. That presumably happens because those steps are automatic for me, so I don't have to think about them, but when others try to do the same thing (not think about them), the automatic thing doesn't happen, and they end up missing the step entirely. They have to remind themselves to think consciously even about things that are normally automatic for me, because they don't have the same muscle memory.

I also wonder if neurodivergency affects this region. I'm autistic, so my brain is detail-oriented. Sometimes it feels like I can perceive "neural circuits" that are implemented by the so-called FPGA. When I have a compulsive behavior or trigger, I can sometimes observe the entire execution flow, not just the result. I think that's neat.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#52

Post by Jensson »

echelon wrote: post #49
armada651 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What signals cause rewiring of the cerebellum? Any signal, that's the point. The cerebellum learns the patterns of signals involved in motor control. This is why you train your skills by doing the correct movement over and over again. Once the cerebellum has adjusted to the correct motor signal patterns the correct movement will become effortless.

> This is why you train your skills by doing the correct movement over and over again. Yes, but can you make this to go faster ?

Pain or satisfaction, probably.

When a motion "feels good", or is painful, probably means you learn. So chase those.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#53

Post by TaupeRanger »

aetherson wrote: post #9

My overall read on this article is that its claims are probably overconfident. Like, it seems interesting, but like she's seeing a few results and making big claims about how the cerebellum plays into overall cognition, and my general sense is that lots of humility is usually warranted here: that simple and decisive statements usually turn out to be riddled with provisos and unexplained behavior.

You are correct. We don't really know what's going on. Every claim can be met with an equally emphatic opposite claim with equally compelling evidence by someone cherry picking the "correct" studies and listening to the "correct" people. What we call neuroscience is still in a pre-Newtonian era.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#54

Post by LoganDark »

eurekin wrote: post #10
jbandela1 wrote: post #4

> 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…

> A lot of our motor learning is in fact wiring the cerebellum correctly. That got me interested: since the wiring is so long (from limbs to cerebellum), what kinds of motor learning? Do we know, if cerebellum needs more energy than the rest of the brain?

> That got me interested: since the wiring is so long (from limbs to cerebellum), what kinds of motor learning?

I'd imagine it's things like training a dominant hand. The skills required for precise motor control, to produce the right movements for e.g. handwriting. Since the wiring is so long, and feedback is delayed, you need to be able to precalculate these movements.

Also imagine how e.g. an intent to move somewhere actually gets implemented. You don't always have to think about each individual step of walking, or pay explicit attention to things like your sense of balance. You probably don't even have to choose that you're going to walk, or think about how to get up. When you want to go somewhere, you just do it, and somehow it's all calculated for you and happens.

When you try to move a specific limb, how do you know which muscles correspond to that limb? In fact, how many of those muscles can you even individually address? You can learn to individually address them, but I bet you don't come with that ability by default.

Then of course there's the question of what even causes your limbs to move once you will them to move.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#55

Post by interstice »

satvikpendem wrote: post #18
jjtheblunt wrote: post #5

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…

I wonder if each iteration gets closer as we go

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#56

Post by Dylan16807 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #18
jjtheblunt wrote: post #5

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…

Though it's not like we're flitting from one bad analogy to another. Hydraulics are a great metaphor for understanding how computers work, for example.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#58

Post by david-gpu »

cubefox wrote: post #28
eurekin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always assumed ANN simply is a universal and learnable function approximator. That is, there is no direct equivalent of classical conditioning. Only data in, expected output pairs

There must be a minimal ANN architecture which implements classical conditioning. This architecture could be quite limited in what it can learn compared to ANNs in general. Similar to how feed-forward networks are limited compared to RNNs.

You can train single layer neural nets. Not very useful, but they do exist.

There are certain ANN architectures that relied on, essentially, classical conditioning based on Hobbian learning rules and variants thereof. Kohonen self-organizing maps are an example of that.

Not that such historical systems are popular today, though.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#59

Post by agumonkey »

jbandela1 wrote: post #4

> 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 thought the cerebellum predated the rest ?

Out of curiosity, having the kind of weird symptoms not far from what you describe as weird amnesia, do you know any books / resources to understand advanced brain neurology like this ?

Thanks in advance

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#60

Post by naveen99 »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #14
jbandela1 wrote: post #4

> 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.

Neurosurgery residency is very, very, very intense. Unfortunately not everyone finishes. When I was in medical school, I remember some general surgery residents quiting after falling asleep in the middle of an operation; another neurosurgery resident I rotated with was pretty miserable, I found out later he quit. I would have liked to be a neurosurgeon, but simply didn’t have the physical stamina.

I ended up becoming a radiologist. Never heard a radiology resident quiting, although have seen a few residents get kicked out for mental issues or gross incompetence.

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