Anyone have cogsci or neurosci reading recs?
What does the cerebellum do?
61–70 of 209 posts
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> gross incompetence
How on Earth do you get to "resident" and have "gross incompetence"?
There are sooo many gates before getting to be a "resident" that this completely baffles me.
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#63> 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…
Its striated structure matches sequential timed operations.
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#64> 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…
What signals cause rewiring of the cerebellum? Is there any way to induce that state exogenously? Some thoughts include dopamine / pain receptor reinforced learning. Maybe there's a faster way?
Psilocybin and other psychedelics may be that exogenous agent, they release Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) [0], which plausibly could cause “rewiring of the cerebellum” [1][2], and may even do this with sub-perceptible (micro)doses [3].
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37280397/
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01389-z
[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.7246...
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> gross incompetence How on Earth do you get to "resident" and have "gross incompetence"? There are sooo many gates before getting to be a "resident" that this completely baffles me.
Undergrad/premed: live with family, have 100% 24/7 familial support of your education, living at home with all of your essential basic living needs taken care of.
Residency: move to a different location away from family, no longer living in a dormitory environment with the expectations associated with being a student but are now a real adult making your way in the world. Suddenly you have to make the whole package work on your own without laundry/cooking/mental health/financial support.
Now you can no longer put 100% of yourself into your studies, but instead can only manage the 60 or 70% that most people can muster when they have to actually maintain their physical existence while also meeting their professional expectations.
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#66> 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…
mk-ultra project monarch
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#67[dead]
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#68So classical conditioning in humans requires special cells in the Cerebellum (Purkinje cells), which can even do single-cell learning. Which artificial neurons can't do, as only weights (artificial synapses) are updated. So how is classical conditioning actually implemented in artificial neural networks? I assume there is some minimum network which makes it work.
> special cells in the Cerebellum (Purkinje cells), which can even do single-cell learning.
As a neuroscience novice, I've always assumed that something about the gross model of the neuron, as far as I understand it, cannot be correct or is incomplete. Because I never understood why single cells aren't already performing single cell learning, given that there are always far more dendrites than axons.
Since this characteristic turns each neuron into a lossy compression function, there has to be some process by which certain dendrites are considered 'more important' carriers of information than others, in order to make a tie-breaking decision about what to include in the compressed signal, and what to throw out, as the cell decedes whether or not to transmit an impulse (including whether or not to override prior inhibitory signals) back up the axon.
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Some 50 year old cartoons about said topic... https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/crunchly
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am way more interested in how you gave up $800,000+ a year to do software engineering.
$800,000 is a lot of money, even after taxes you'd only have to work a few years at that salary before you could live reasonably comfortably for the rest of your life without working at all. Seems perfectly reasonably to switch to a lower stress career at some point.
The personalities attracted to the role aren’t really amenable to thinking that way.