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Interesting! Is there a brain region related to telling apart results of imagination and our actual perception that would work as a fail-safe mechanism?

by d33 11y ago

Balgair 11y ago
The ACC. Brains are squishy and evolved from fish, especially the basal ganglia parts like the ACC. They don't have fail-safe parts. Whatever gets 'routed' is going to synapse regardless of if it is 'real' or not. You cause a neuron to fire and it fires and sends it's signal onwards, it does not care why it fired. Caution, hand-waving abounds in this comment.
- conceit 11y ago
  That's a bold claim indeed, especially with that attempt at an explanation. > You cause a neuron to fire and it fires Tautology much? > it does not care why it fired. That's not even good English grammar. I mean, it's a very informal style, that I only understand because the information is redundant. Of course there are fail-safe parts. I don't even need to study to see that redundancy is a vital feature of the nervous system. In the same way, the ACC probably isn't the only point of failure for certain perceptions of the environment.
omginternets 11y ago
The ACC is implicated in many, many, many things, but it always seems to rear its head when error-monitoring of some sort is involved. Any time you want to respond to a mis-prediction, an error of judgement, or some sort of high-level mismatch, you're pretty much guaranteed to see ACC involvement. The theory goes that beyond some differential threshold, the ACC detects the mismatch between the perception (the tiger in my example) and the sensation (the actual input into the system) and then "does something". We're not sure what that "something" is: it could -- to proceed by computational analogy -- raise an exception and signal some other process to regulate the system, or it may directly inhibit certain early visual neurons in an attempt to downplay percept. This theory could also be completely wrong.

Interesting! Is there a brain region related to telling apart results of imagination and our actual perception that would work as a fail-safe mechanism?

by d33 11y ago

Interesting! Is there a brain region related to telling apart results of imagination and our actual perception that would work as a fail-safe mechanism?

Balgair 11y ago

The ACC. Brains are squishy and evolved from fish, especially the basal ganglia parts like the ACC. They don't have fail-safe parts. Whatever gets 'routed' is going to synapse regardless of if it is 'real' or not. You cause a neuron to fire and it fires and sends it's signal onwards, it does not care why it fired. Caution, hand-waving abounds in this comment.

conceit 11y ago
That's a bold claim indeed, especially with that attempt at an explanation. > You cause a neuron to fire and it fires Tautology much? > it does not care why it fired. That's not even good English grammar. I mean, it's a very informal style, that I only understand because the information is redundant. Of course there are fail-safe parts. I don't even need to study to see that redundancy is a vital feature of the nervous system. In the same way, the ACC probably isn't the only point of failure for certain perceptions of the environment.

omginternets 11y ago

The ACC is implicated in many, many, many things, but it always seems to rear its head when error-monitoring of some sort is involved. Any time you want to respond to a mis-prediction, an error of judgement, or some sort of high-level mismatch, you're pretty much guaranteed to see ACC involvement. The theory goes that beyond some differential threshold, the ACC detects the mismatch between the perception (the tiger in my example) and the sensation (the actual input into the system) and then "does something". We're not sure what that "something" is: it could -- to proceed by computational analogy -- raise an exception and signal some other process to regulate the system, or it may directly inhibit certain early visual neurons in an attempt to downplay percept. This theory could also be completely wrong.