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.
What does the cerebellum do?
11–20 of 209 posts
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#12So 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.
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#13Earlier 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.
Both are spot on examples on what the cerebellum does. If I may, a third example/analogy that comes to mind is cache memory or L2ARC drives, at least that’s how I have it stored in my mind (pun intended) :-)
"The brain is like a computer that"-style analogies are rarely fitting, or so vague as to being almost useless. My fridge is an L2 cache for food I want to eat soon.
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#14> 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.
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#15> 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…
Yeah, the discussion of classical conditioning led me to the same sort of conclusion. The fact that cerebelum has been growing faster in human like primates as a percentage of our already larger brains, well, I can't help but think that all our social reactions, drives, and complex needs are essentially some kind of cooption of this FPGA for optimization purposes. Like cerebrum does training and cerebelum et al do evaluation.
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#16So 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.
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
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both are spot on examples on what the cerebellum does. If I may, a third example/analogy that comes to mind is cache memory or L2ARC drives, at least that’s how I have it stored in my mind (pun intended) :-)
"The brain is like a computer that"-style analogies are rarely fitting, or so vague as to being almost useless. My fridge is an L2 cache for food I want to eat soon.
It would be a useful analogy for someone intricately familiar with computers but who was only sort of vaguely familiar with the concept of eating, has thought about houses only on occasion, and knows about refrigerators only insofar as they’re a food-related thing inside a house.
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#18> 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 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 to the influence of machine learning and AI today. I wonder what metaphors we will come up with next.
http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/teaching/w12/philneuro/metaphorsan...
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#19My 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.
Did you also read the comment by Steve Byrens with his own theory on what the Cerebellum does, and the author's reply of "seems right" ?!
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#20> 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?
> 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.