What does the cerebellum do? • Hacker News Board

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#171

Post by nickpsecurity » Mon, Jan 08, 2024, 6:39 PM UTC

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…

This actually happened to me when I lost most of my memory in an accident. I couldn’t even remember my job tasks enough to describe how to do them. They were repetitive, though, with it all in my intuition or muscle memory. I could do the stuff without knowing why I was doing it. My friends and I joked I was the Jason Borne of the place. It’s a strange feeling, too, because I could feel like something was missing as I acted.

I was also a supervisor in a competitive company with people gunning for my job. The Recession was not a good time to be disabled. I feared demotion or termination. I hid my injury while trying to get back in mental shape. They chalked up occasional forgetfulness to the stress we were all under and my constant partying. (That was before I was in a relationship with Jesus Christ and gave up those sins.)

Eventually, one of my recovery strategies was to take note of the specific things I did on instinct, think about why I did them, and re-create the mental models. I’d also just ask people how they did things and what they learned works best. Many were people I trained with my prior techniques who re-taught them to me. By practicing those, I both re-learned my mental model of how to do the job and connected it with the instinctual wiring.

There were one or two other trucks that helped. That was the part relevant to your comment, though. I never quite got back to my old level of performance. Capitalizing on how intuitive memory is different than conscious memory has helped me in many places ever since. I just keep breaking it into simple things that I repeat over and over to. Then, keep applying those pieces in new ways to keep my brain fresh.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#172

Post by butlike » Mon, Jan 08, 2024, 6:41 PM UTC

doubled112 wrote: post #85

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My fridge is an L2 cache for food I want to eat soon. I would think fridge is RAM, L2 is table, L1 is plate. (I am deliberately ignoring the pun potential for Cold Storage.) But other than bickering about the exact mapping, I don't see the problem with that analogy?

Cold storage is my freezer. There's often a delay between when I need it and when it is ready.

AC outlet is the clock speed!

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#173

Post by butlike » Mon, Jan 08, 2024, 6:45 PM UTC

dogmatism wrote: post #35

lostlogin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OP said "did" implying finished. It's a six year residency minimum, though the first year is general surgery. It's not often people do the whole damn thing, then decide to bail. Usually it's after 2 or 3 years Though some people are less burdened by golden handcuffs and sunk-cost fallacy Plus, I've never met a happy (or sane) neurosurgeon

I'm in no way even close to being in the medical field, but I could see it as an unreconcilable dichotomy between the hippocratic oath and the fact you're going to be causing damage no matter what.

Sure, the hemmhorage needs to be fixed, so you're preventing further damage, but every cut may cause unknown ramifications. Anyway, I'm postulating a neurosurgeon would be aware of this, and have to carry that around with them.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#174

Post by silentwanderer » Mon, Jan 08, 2024, 7:14 PM UTC

solax wrote: post #109

That's an interesting perspective. While I agree that the pace of advancements in neuroscience is slower compared to AI, I think it's important to note that understanding the brain is a fundamentally different problem than building intelligent machines. The human brain is an incredibly complex system with billions of interconnected neurons, and we still have a long way to go in terms of fully understanding how it wor…

Hi ChatGPT!

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#175

Post by pineal » Mon, Jan 08, 2024, 7:19 PM UTC

dogmatism wrote: post #35

lostlogin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OP said "did" implying finished. It's a six year residency minimum, though the first year is general surgery. It's not often people do the whole damn thing, then decide to bail. Usually it's after 2 or 3 years Though some people are less burdened by golden handcuffs and sunk-cost fallacy Plus, I've never met a happy (or sane) neurosurgeon

Medicine as a career offers immense personal fulfillment, variety, human interaction, and prestige at the expense of dealing with difficult outcomes and ranges of personal sacrifice -- neurosurgery as a specialty just takes all of these to their extremes.

I value the former and find ways to discount the latter. So I am very happy. Though sane or not would be up to others.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#176

Post by joshuahedlund » Mon, Jan 08, 2024, 7:58 PM UTC

retrac wrote: post #21

padolsey wrote: post #11

What a marvellous article. One thing I’ve never quite appreciated in neuroscience is how useful physical movement is as a debugging layer. During a task, in observing gaits, tremors, speed, accuracy, etc., you’re able to gain a deeper understanding of how cognition works for non-movement tasks. I guess cognition is, after all, still just movement, but through a conceptual plane instead of a physical one.

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.

See the book Metaphors We Live By for more on this. (It's a little heady and the authors lost me with some of their deeper claims in the second half of the book, but the first few chapters were fascinating)

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#177

Post by Jensson » Mon, Jan 08, 2024, 8:57 PM UTC

larkost wrote: post #165

pi-e-sigma wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Evolution doesn't happen quickly, but selection does. If something greatly changed how we select partners the past 100 years it could have an effect within a single generation generation. What could that be? Well, maybe feminism so women don't need to rely on a man to provide income, maybe socialist policies so nobody has to go hungry, and so on, plenty of reasons why some genes could be selected out of the gene pool that was previously fine there.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#178

Post by cubefox » Mon, Jan 08, 2024, 9:44 PM UTC

im3w1l wrote: post #163

cubefox wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Things can be hardwired

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#179

Post by riversflow » Mon, Jan 08, 2024, 10:07 PM UTC

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

Lack of disease and disease treatment. Mostly Vaccines. I got sick like 2-3 times grand total growing up, and only once any more than mildly. My parents and their parents all got badly sick more than that growing up, and both have stories about being on deaths door, e.g. my dad got german measels at 17 and was bed ridden for a month; I didn’t get my last growrh spurt until I was 19.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#180

Post by nickpsecurity » Mon, Jan 08, 2024, 10:38 PM UTC

trealira wrote: post #162

Terr_ wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Alternatively, God made human babies superior in design from birth by giving them increased adaptability. The extra flexibility might require the specific movements to be trained, puts them behind on any specific goal at the start, and over time makes them exceed the innate capabilities of other species over time. By exceed, they might have a higher variety of behaviors or do them better (esp with tech).

In A.I., we see this with hard-coded, assembly FSM’s vs interpreters running high-level code. The former works with high-efficiency out of the box but can’t change behavior or improve much. The latter does nothing until it’s taught the extra knowledge (interpreted codes) which also might have new behaviors (functions). Many game developers switched from hard-coded assembly to interpreted code for AI agents for that reason.

So, it’s not under-developed: it’s a better-developed component with different tradeoffs.