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> The cerebellum has a repeated, almost crystal-like neural structure: As a software engineer who did neurosurgery residency, my intuition/guess is that the ce
by jbandela1 3y ago
> 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 efficiently. A lot of our motor learning is in fact wiring the cerebellum correctly.
This can actually lead to an interesting amnesia, where a person can learn a skill (cerebellum) but not remember learning the skill (cerebrum). 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.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoWhat 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.
- NKosmatos 3y agoBoth 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) :-)
- rzzzt 3y ago"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.
- burke 3y agoIt 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.
- xattt 3y ago> My fridge is an L2 cache for food I want to eat soon. A less-volatile form of L2 cache. Food pocketed in my cheeks are the CPU registers?
- kazinator 3y agoSome fridges are like magnetic tapes, with files from 1978.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago> 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?
- doubled112 3y agoCold storage is my freezer. There's often a delay between when I need it and when it is ready.
- butlike 3y agoAC outlet is the clock speed!
- taneq 3y agoHere comes the Forkbus! brm brm
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chaxor 3y agoWhat's wrong with the fridge analogy? It's an analogy for a reason. It bothers me when people combat analogies so incredibly hard. Of course, it is not really fitting or the same thing - it's an analogy.
- satvikpendem 3y agoIt 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/metaphorsandconceptionsofbrain.key.pdf http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/teaching/w12/philneuro/metaphorsan...
- Dylan16807 3y agoThough it's not like we're flitting from one bad analogy to another. Hydraulics are a great metaphor for understanding how computers work, for example.
- shagie 3y agoSome 50 year old cartoons about said topic... https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/crunchly https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/crunchly
- passion__desire 3y agoI always liken this process of reality being a fractal boundary of mandelbrot and our attempts to understand it through language and metaphors as a way to approximate and fit that boundary. Consider the successive colored stripes like a updated and accurate metaphors in the following video https://youtu.be/u_P83LcI8Oc?si=ObkNyUfCCSUCb0Vt https://youtu.be/u_P83LcI8Oc?si=ObkNyUfCCSUCb0Vt
- interstice 3y agoI wonder if each iteration gets closer as we go
- chaxor 3y agoThe next metaphor would be quantum computers. There are a few that have started suggesting quantum mechanics playing a large role in cognition, but very few take them seriously (obviously it has an effect, but likely much can be understood more classically, etc). The fact that few are moving toward that style of thinking seems to give a bit more credibility to NNs being closer to the correct model. If spiking NNs take off more, we'll probably see more arguments around that, and if Blue Brain's full in-silico modeling takes off we may see the succinct description given by those studies used to describe ideas. However, to first approximation, NNs and spiking NNs aren't really a bad way to reason about large descriptions of brain dynamics, in many circumstances.
- echelon 3y agoWhat 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?
- armada651 3y ago> 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.
- echelon 3y ago> This is why you train your skills by doing the correct movement over and over again. Yes, but can you make this to go faster?
- Jensson 3y agoPain or satisfaction, probably. When a motion "feels good", or is painful, probably means you learn. So chase those.
- Spooky23 3y agoTrain harder. Develop habits.
- echelon 3y agoI think we're in the "punch card" phase of biology. I'd be willing to bet (timeline uncertain) that there will be shortcuts to this process. For now, opportunity cost rules the day. I'm 120% maxed out.
- Balgair 3y agoYou'd have to apply an adverse stimulus in under a ~5ms threshold to actions that were 'wrong'. It would depend on the exact task you're trying to do though. That would then cause other areas to potentiate that specific movement/firing as incorrect. Its a active area of research in sports and DoD. As you'd theoretically be able to train marksmen and athletes at a much faster and better rate. However, even really really fast computers aren't quite fast enough to apply the adverse stimulus to 'wrong' movements/firing. Also, your computer better be really accurate and never mess up, or that person is going to have a hell of a time retraining their brain. Also, their brain may view that the clouds/temperature/itchy grass/breakfast are the reasons for the adverse stimulus, as this is all happening at in subconscious time frame. So, good luck there.
- eurekin 3y ago> A lot of our motor learning is in fact wiring the cerebellum correctly. That got me interested: since the wiring is so long (from limbs to cerebellum), what kinds of motor learning? Do we know, if cerebellum needs more energy than the rest of the brain?
- LoganDark 3y ago> That got me interested: since the wiring is so long (from limbs to cerebellum), what kinds of motor learning? I'd imagine it's things like training a dominant hand. The skills required for precise motor control, to produce the right movements for e.g. handwriting. Since the wiring is so long, and feedback is delayed, you need to be able to precalculate these movements. Also imagine how e.g. an intent to move somewhere actually gets implemented. You don't always have to think about each individual step of walking, or pay explicit attention to things like your sense of balance. You probably don't even have to choose that you're going to walk, or think about how to get up. When you want to go somewhere, you just do it, and somehow it's all calculated for you and happens. When you try to move a specific limb, how do you know which muscles correspond to that limb? In fact, how many of those muscles can you even individually address? You can learn to individually address them, but I bet you don't come with that ability by default. Then of course there's the question of what even causes your limbs to move once you will them to move.
- Sharlin 3y agoWhat do you mean? The cerebellum is closer to the spinal cord than the rest of the brains. And there's no learning happening anywhere but the brain, vertebrates don't have distributed central nervous system like octopuses do. The only thing vertebrate limbs can do on their own are certain hardcoded reflex actions.
- eurekin 3y agoSo the spinal cord is only a wire and, besides reflexes, there is no processing done anywhere else, but the brain? How about neurons in the gut, I've read somewhere that intestines are lined up with some neural "mesh". Is that only for signal transmission?
- throw1234651234 3y agoI am way more interested in how you gave up $800,000+ a year to do software engineering.
- lostlogin 3y agoObviously not OP and not in this position, but I have worked with people who left surgical training positions and their reasons were health and a realisation that they would miss every family milestone, never get a real break and have every part of their life revolve around their job with the money and god-like power not compensating for that. Obviously that’s one side of the equation, I don’t have any surgeon friends I know well enough to give the opposing view.
- lacrimacida 3y agoSome can do it. Are they really different than the rest?? Perhaps higher tolerance to stress or even thriving in it?
- dogmatism 3y agoOP said "did" implying finished. It's a six year residency minimum, though the first year is general surgery. It's not often people do the whole damn thing, then decide to bail. Usually it's after 2 or 3 years Though some people are less burdened by golden handcuffs and sunk-cost fallacy Plus, I've never met a happy (or sane) neurosurgeon
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- butlike 3y agoI'm in no way even close to being in the medical field, but I could see it as an unreconcilable dichotomy between the hippocratic oath and the fact you're going to be causing damage no matter what. Sure, the hemmhorage needs to be fixed, so you're preventing further damage, but every cut may cause unknown ramifications. Anyway, I'm postulating a neurosurgeon would be aware of this, and have to carry that around with them.
- jvanderbot 3y agoYeah, 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.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoThis is great and I agree with the reprogrammable part. However think of it more like switch or a router between the PNS/CNS (minus vision) and the “higher brain“ longer term planning systems.
- apwell23 3y ago> 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Wherecombinator 3y agoThanks for that. Don’t often laugh at a comment
- LoganDark 3y agoDo 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 themselves to think consciously even about things that are normally automatic for me, because they don't have the same muscle memory. I also wonder if neurodivergency affects this region. I'm autistic, so my brain is detail-oriented. Sometimes it feels like I can perceive "neural circuits" that are implemented by the so-called FPGA. When I have a compulsive behavior or trigger, I can sometimes observe the entire execution flow, not just the result. I think that's neat.
- voidpointercast 3y ago[flagged]
- LoganDark 3y agoWhat makes you say that? Please have something more creative than "dissociative identities can't be aware of each other".
- agumonkey 3y agoI 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
- hyperthesis 3y agoIts striated structure matches sequential timed operations.
- samstave 3y agomk-ultra project monarch
- codetiger 3y agoThis comment is the best example of why I come to read comments in HN.
- nickpsecurity 3y agoThis actually happened to me when I lost most of my memory in an accident. I couldn’t even remember my job tasks enough to describe how to do them. They were repetitive, though, with it all in my intuition or muscle memory. I could do the stuff without knowing why I was doing it. My friends and I joked I was the Jason Borne of the place. It’s a strange feeling, too, because I could feel like something was missing as I acted. I was also a supervisor in a competitive company with people gunning for my job. The Recession was not a good time to be disabled. I feared demotion or termination. I hid my injury while trying to get back in mental shape. They chalked up occasional forgetfulness to the stress we were all under and my constant partying. (That was before I was in a relationship with Jesus Christ and gave up those sins.) Eventually, one of my recovery strategies was to take note of the specific things I did on instinct, think about why I did them, and re-create the mental models. I’d also just ask people how they did things and what they learned works best. Many were people I trained with my prior techniques who re-taught them to me. By practicing those, I both re-learned my mental model of how to do the job and connected it with the instinctual wiring. There were one or two other trucks that helped. That was the part relevant to your comment, though. I never quite got back to my old level of performance. Capitalizing on how intuitive memory is different than conscious memory has helped me in many places ever since. I just keep breaking it into simple things that I repeat over and over to. Then, keep applying those pieces in new ways to keep my brain fresh.