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What does the cerebellum do?

sarahconstantin.substack.com

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Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#161

Post by Sharlin »

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?

What do you mean? The cerebellum is closer to the spinal cord than the rest of the brains. And there's no learning happening anywhere but the brain, vertebrates don't have distributed central nervous system like octopuses do. The only thing vertebrate limbs can do on their own are certain hardcoded reflex actions.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#162

Post by trealira »

Terr_ wrote: post #104
retrac wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been argued that most, maybe all, of human cognition is based on a sort of folk-physics mental model with objects. We throw ideas into the ring to be chewed on and distilled and maybe brought in to practice or thrown out as useless. The linguistic metaphors we use, at least, to talk about ideas and abstractions, are never more than one, maybe two, steps away from a hand moving or rearranging something.

> folk-physics mental model with objects Kind of like how object permanence [0] must be learned by babies, slowly worked into their internal model, even though "things don't usually vanish when they go behind other things" seems like reliably low-hanging fruit for any process (whether evolutionary or meddling demigod) to wire up as instinctual physics knowledge. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence

Animals like newborn deer fawns are born knowing how to walk, follow their mothers around, and run away from danger, although their legs are weak at first. So this makes me wonder if having to learn object permanence is just one more example of human babies being underdeveloped compared to those of other species of animals.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#163

Post by im3w1l »

cubefox wrote: post #103
im3w1l wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well classical conditioning kind of only makes sense in the context of an agent that is receiving inputs and taking actions on them. Many neural networks don't solve problems of that type, and so have no need for classical conditioning. But when you do have such a problem conditioning is not very complicated. The normal algorithms and neural structures are designed to learn stuff like "when a given input happens a ce…

Yeah. It's just not quite clear what the minimal example for such a network would be. I assume you have N inputs and one output. The output always active when input 1 is active, otherwise the output is inactive. So the other inputs are ignored. However, when one of those other inputs, x, tends to be temporally correlated with input 1, after a while x will generate an output upon activation even if input 1 isn't activ…

> The output always active when input 1 is active.

Neural networks don't have instinctive behavior like that.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#165

Post by larkost »

pi-e-sigma wrote: post #153
NhanH wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human society provides nowhere enough pressure for evolution to have effect (for good reasons), and our humanity timeline is nowhere near lengthy enough so far either. So I don’t think we are heading anywhere in that regards

How would you explain increasing average height in the US youth in the last 30 years? It can't be food availability, because 30 years ago people weren't hungry either

Absolutely food, or at most a hormonal change based on food. Possibly with s side-order of lack of a few of the childhood diseases that have been controlled with inoculations. 30 years is WAY too small a timeframe for human evolution. That works on the order of 50-100 generations, not a single generation.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#166

Post by circlefavshape »

Terr_ wrote: post #104
retrac wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been argued that most, maybe all, of human cognition is based on a sort of folk-physics mental model with objects. We throw ideas into the ring to be chewed on and distilled and maybe brought in to practice or thrown out as useless. The linguistic metaphors we use, at least, to talk about ideas and abstractions, are never more than one, maybe two, steps away from a hand moving or rearranging something.

> folk-physics mental model with objects Kind of like how object permanence [0] must be learned by babies, slowly worked into their internal model, even though "things don't usually vanish when they go behind other things" seems like reliably low-hanging fruit for any process (whether evolutionary or meddling demigod) to wire up as instinctual physics knowledge. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence

To me it makes very little sense for object permanence to be learned rather than innate - have a look at the "contradicting evidence" in the article you linked

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#168

Post by LoganDark »

voidpointercast wrote: post #123
LoganDark wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 themse…

[flagged]

What makes you say that? Please have something more creative than "dissociative identities can't be aware of each other".

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#169

Post by seaslug »

Balgair wrote: post #75
strontian wrote: post #61

Anyone have cogsci or neurosci reading recs?

https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Fifth-Kande... As Jackson is to E&M, Kandel is to neuro. It's the text.

Kandel is superb but it's written for grad students and advanced undergrads with a solid biology foundation. A typical undergrad neurosci textbook would be an easier start for a non-biology person.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#170

Post by butlike »

helboi4 wrote: post #118
weinzierl wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help thinking that this is where humanity is heading. Given that the different parts of the brain have to compete for resources and given what the cerebellum does, it makes sense that a lesser developed one can be an advantage: It frees up resources for parts of the brain that are more important in our times.

I'm not sure about that. Being unable to anticipate context sounds terrible for pretty much any task. Having to think through every step of anything is terrible. Not being able to form sentences fluently and instead having to arrange them like puzzles is far too time consuming. The article literally is explaining how a large cerebellum is crucial for humans' high intelligence. Reallocating resources to other parts of…

Being unable to anticipate context could reduce the prevalence of stereotyping, for instance.
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