If you're curious about the pronunciation of Purkinje like me: In Czech, [purkɪɲɛ] (spelled Purkyně); in English, per-kin-jee [/pɝkɪnd͡ʒiː/].
What does the cerebellum do?
121–130 of 209 posts
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#122Why must mental functions be localized to physical components?
My guess: because it's useful with following analogy.
We use text embeddings to represent concepts written words. They lack the nuance, when the same word has different meaning in different concepts. LLM's use text embeddings and enrich it with the Attention mechanism.
For words, that in reality are used to represent a single concept, a text embedding is working perfectly on it's own.
For those concepts that are context dependent, we're using the attention mechanism to gently guide the text embedding closer to the intended, identified by surrounding words, meaning. That's the role of the Value vector of the K, Q, V triplet in the Attention mechanism to be precise.
So, this is a simplistic approach, which corresponds to the "first approximation", which could be good enough for some cases. We don't know which exactly yet, but we'll know, once enough evidence is given to the contrary.
It's not a good model, but a very good approach in order to do research in a stepwise manner. With time, it'll get more and more nuanced, one approximation at a time.
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#123> 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 themse…
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Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#124Earlier 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.
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
I agree but on the flip side it is interesting to consider what were the pressures and the timeline to bring us to where we are now.
Great ape brains are distinguished from monkey brains by their larger frontal and cerebellar lobes. The Neanderthals had bigger brains than us but smaller cerebella. And, most strikingly, modern humans have much bigger cerebella than “anatomically modern” Cro-Magnon humans of only 50,000 years ago (but relatively smaller cerebral hemispheres!)
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#125> While humans don’t have these kinds of sensory systems (He's talking about sensing the 3D environment using electric fields) I wonder whether binaural hearing is such a sensory system. You can blindfold someone, then lead them into a space. They can tell whether they're outdoors, or in a small, bare room, or a concert hall, or a room with furniture and drapes. Perhaps they can tell whether they're near or far from…
A sighted person who is not blindfolded can do the same thing, relying on reconstructing their 3D environment from the way electromagnetic radiation affects the rhodopsin in their retinas rather than the movement of hairs in their cochlea due to air pressure changes over time, and integrating the differences between a spatially separate pair of detectors.
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#126"The cerebellum may also inspire artificial-intelligence approaches somewhat, especially approaches to robotics or other control, in that it may be be beneficial to include a fast feedforward-only predictive modeling step to control real-time actions..." This is pretty widespread in controls, actually. The dominant control technique for legged robotics is model-predictive control ("MPC") which explicitly uses such a…
Predictive models are also behind many of the SOTA results in modern reinforcement learning, although they are often used to generate fictive data from which a policy is learnt.
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#127> 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…
> So you could end up with a person who would think that he had never seen a basketball hoop or basketball before but could be doing layups, dunks, and 3 pointers with ease. I know a lot of people with the opposite problem.
Thanks for that. Don’t often laugh at a comment
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#128Amazing article, and for a layperson who’s been reading a lot of neuroscience, the perfect level of complexity. I love an article that makes you (internally) shout “why haven’t I wondered about that before?” over and over, so thanks for that. A compliment as to clarity of purpose, I suppose. Materially; That’s bad news for anyone hoping to simulate a brain digitally. It means there’s a lot more relevant stuff to simu…
Precisely, connectionism in modern AI boils down to the idea that learning should be expressed in terms of DAGs that are composed of simpler units. It’s quite likely that the units that are currently used are too abstract, but this doesn’t necessarily mean the paradigm itself is flawed.
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Fifth-Kande...
Thanks a lot
Re: What does the cerebellum do?
#130Is cerebellum responsible for muscle memory?
Not really, but it can be involved for some tasks. 'Muscle Memory' is a bit of a complex thing. It's not so much the firing of the neurons, as much as it is the timing of that firing. Your reaction time is at the ~5ms level. Much longer than the muscles need to move in concert to, say, hit a 3-pointer. Controlling all of that can take place all the way from the brain down to the ganglia of the spinal chord. Drinking…
It is interesting though. Do you know if there is a name for this particular area of neuroscience?