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What does the cerebellum do?

sarahconstantin.substack.com

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Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#81

Post by akavi »

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 distinctive disfluencies in speech around conjugations (swapping "but"/"and"/"although") and sequencing (ie, placing objects before subjects/verbs) in sentences as well swapping relationships (referring to someone's parent as their child or vice versa, swapping "you" and "I/me", etc)

4. I tend to have a "ground up" approach to writing (building clauses first and then moving them around to construct sentences), which doesn't resemble the approach of other people I've shoulder-surfed.

All of these are fairly mild in terms of life impact, to be clear (or perhaps I'm just able to satisfactorily compensate for them in various ways) but I wonder if they all share some underlying minor cerebellar dysfunction.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#82

Post by devilbunny »

bsder wrote: post #62
naveen99 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neurosurgery residency is very, very, very intense. Unfortunately not everyone finishes. When I was in medical school, I remember some general surgery residents quiting after falling asleep in the middle of an operation; another neurosurgery resident I rotated with was pretty miserable, I found out later he quit. I would have liked to be a neurosurgeon, but simply didn’t have the physical stamina. I ended up becoming…

> gross incompetence How on Earth do you get to "resident" and have "gross incompetence"? There are sooo many gates before getting to be a "resident" that this completely baffles me.

It happens. Often incompetence is specific to one specialty - neurosurgery is competitive, so you can assume that anyone who gets it has at least adequate grades/test scores. But that doesn't mean that they're clinically worth a damn.

I'm an anesthesiologist. There are people who wash out because they just don't have the temperament for it. They're not dumb, they're not even bad doctors, they just aren't mentally equipped to sit back and relax while running a code.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#83

Post by function_seven »

satvikpendem wrote: post #18
jjtheblunt wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

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…

I always thought neural networks were an example of the analogy working the other direction. Instead of modeling our brain on the technology of the time, we chose to model the next technology on how we think our brains work?

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#85

Post by doubled112 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #47
rzzzt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> 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.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#87

Post by bsdpufferfish »

doug_durham wrote: post #86
bsdpufferfish wrote: post #84

Why must mental functions be localized to physical components?

Are you suggesting a metaphysical structure? I don't understand what you are getting at.

Even if you are a full materialist it's fallacious to assume there is one "part" that does something, like it's a factory assembly. Instead it might be a function of the composition of brain parts.

It's like asking which part of a bat makes it fly. The wings? Well kind of, but you need more than that. I guess you can fly without feet... it's just not a well formed question.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#88

Post by chrisfosterelli »

bsdpufferfish wrote: post #84

Why must mental functions be localized to physical components?

They probably aren't, at least at the level we often teach. Much of our knowledge about the brain comes from observing people who have pieces missing and seeing how their behaviour differs from a normal adult or putting people in an fMRI scanner and saying "wow, that area used a lot of oxygen compared to baseline". This, and a scientist's nature to classify things, led to a lot of overoptimistic categorization of brain function to specific regions. As neuroscience has matured the field has grown to recognize a more nuanced view that most computation in the brain is more distributed than we first assumed, and different areas are often involved in overlapping functions. It can also change over time or after extreme brain trauma. But it's not correct to say it's fully distributed either. The honest answer is we still have an extremely poor understanding of how the brain works.

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#89

Post by patcon »

satvikpendem wrote: post #18
jjtheblunt wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

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…

Heh not sure if you're aware, but our brain seems to have a special treatment or logic for contextualizing "high technology", as indicated by one well-documented failure modes: the "influencing machine" is a feature of schizophrenia which features a delusion that contemporary high technology (magnets, pneumatics, gears, mind-control drugs, satellites, prob AI now, etc) is being used by mysterious attackers to control the sufferers body and mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_the_%22Infl...

Though not mentioned in the post, schizophrenia (oddly enough) is also tied to cerebellar dysfunction: https://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/jnp.12.2.193#...

Re: What does the cerebellum do?

#90

Post by xmprt »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #14
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…

I am way more interested in how you gave up $800,000+ a year to do software engineering.

Assuming they only got as far as their residency (and didn't end up as attending physician), it's possible that they didn't see themselves spending a full 7 years as a resident doctor (making under $100k/year working 80+ hour weeks) only to spend the rest of their lives doing more of the same except with a much higher salary. If they already graduated their residency then the reasoning is the same except it's be a much harder decision because of the sunk cost.
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