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What does the cerebellum do?

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Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#151

Post by kiba »

weinzierl wrote: post #97
akavi wrote: post #81

This is fascinating to me. The list of things the author suggests the cerebellum handles is a tailor-made list of things I'm oddly bad at: 1. I'm very uncoordinated, with a noticeable intentional tremor 2. I'm particularly bad at sequencing dependencies for projects/errands/household tasks. I have to write down even fairly simple sequences of subtasks or get lost in yak-shaving loops 3. When flustered, I make very di…

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.

Movement is very important to our health. People who don't move as often just die younger than those who don't.

I don't know how it would impact our evolution long term.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#152

Post by anon84873628 »

emayljames wrote: post #120
akavi wrote: post #81

This is fascinating to me. The list of things the author suggests the cerebellum handles is a tailor-made list of things I'm oddly bad at: 1. I'm very uncoordinated, with a noticeable intentional tremor 2. I'm particularly bad at sequencing dependencies for projects/errands/household tasks. I have to write down even fairly simple sequences of subtasks or get lost in yak-shaving loops 3. When flustered, I make very di…

These seem highly related to neurodivergence, such as ASD and ADHD.

Indeed, the article reminded me of the link between executive dysfunction (ADHD) and other problems like sensory processing disorders and postural sway.

Turns out studies have confirmed the overlap in these conditions and also linked it with reduced grey matter volume in the cerebellum:

https://psychcentral.com/adhd/postural-sway-adhd#postural-sw...

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#153

Post by pi-e-sigma »

NhanH wrote: post #116
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.

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

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#154

Post by timeagain »

kiba wrote: post #151
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.

Movement is very important to our health. People who don't move as often just die younger than those who don't. I don't know how it would impact our evolution long term.

Doesn’t matter if you live to 55 or 95 if you have some kids when you’re 25.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#155

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

timeagain wrote: post #154
kiba wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Movement is very important to our health. People who don't move as often just die younger than those who don't. I don't know how it would impact our evolution long term.

Doesn’t matter if you live to 55 or 95 if you have some kids when you’re 25.

I don't think that's correct; raising your kids - and potentially involvement with grandkids! - impacts long term results.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#156

Post by jampekka »

bbor wrote: post #41

Amazing 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…

At least one self-avowed professional connectionist here. I was coming to make similar critique here.

Connectionism isn't and never was about trying to simulate the biological neural networks and other anatomy. As you said, it's about emphasizing the network and network emergent phenomena over isolated pieces (e.g. "grandmother neurons" or strict localization of brain function). At the information processing level the contrast is to classicism/symbolicism that tries to explain cognition as atomic and modular operations on symbols.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#157

Post by jampekka »

einsum wrote: post #128
bbor wrote: post #41

Amazing 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.

I don't think connectionism is restricted to acyclic graphs. Or even graphs in general. But you're right that the connectionism as an approach is more abstract than just simulating neuron behavior.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#158

Post by stcredzero »

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.

One thing I’ve never quite appreciated in neuroscience is how useful physical movement is as a debugging layer.

My sister, who is a choreographer, had some interesting views on how movement could be used as therapy. (Specifically, crawling, as a base-level movement.) I thought that was woo-woo, but later I read that there was some medical support for this.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#159

Post by stcredzero »

mihaaly wrote: post #139

I like the beginning of the article quite a lot for giving an overview of the cerebellum, teaching that it is the home of unconscious learning, but to me it goes into weak speculations quite quickly, first with the 'Purkinje cells learn individually but not other found do that' leads to 'neuron connectivity is not enough to simulate' brain activity while knowing that higher level mental activity exists without cerebe…

I find this particularly interesting:

The brain is not like a neural network where the only thing that is “learned” or “updated” is the weights between neurons. At least some learning evidently happens within individual neurons.

That’s bad news for anyone hoping to simulate a brain digitally. It means there’s a lot more relevant stuff to simulate (like the learning that goes on within cells) than the connectionist paradigm of treating each biological neuron like a neural-net “neuron” would imply, and thus the computational requirements of simulating a brain are higher — maybe vastly higher — than connectionists hope.

I had heard this as well close to ten years ago on some NPR radio show: That researchers had reasons to suspect that a whole lot more processing happens within the synapses themselves.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#160

Post by altruios »

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…

Having no context does allow for a fresh perspective...

Having to think things through slowly step by step may reveal errors other's glossed over...

the cerebellum is important. But maybe, since we really know less about the brain than we think we do, differently wired does not equate 'stupider'. It takes all sorts to make a world.

I agree with the language part, tedious... but maybe in certain situations it might be useful.

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