Cerebellum More Involved In Cognition Than Previously Believed (npr.org) 40
Rick Schumann writes about the findings of a new study published in the journal Neuron: A team of neuroscientists from Washington University in St. Louis, performing fMRI tests on 10 people to quantify the various connections between the cerebellum and the rest of the brain, are now being led to believe that the cerebellum actually plays a role in conscious thought, whereas previously it was believed it was only involved in sensory-motor function. What they found is that it appears that only 20 percent of the cerebellum was dedicated to physical motion, while the other 80 percent serves as an "editor" of the conscious thought process, refining and filtering thoughts in a sort of background process. This discovery may lead to changes in the way psychiatric patients are treated for disorders like schizophrenia, depression, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.
One baby step closer to real AI? (Score:5, Insightful)
Aeroplanes are not made out of feathers (Score:2)
Certainly understanding human cognition will help AI development. But AI will no more be a copy of a biological brain than an aeroplane is a copy of a bird.
Wait a minute (Score:1)
Refining thought? OK fine. But filtering? So that even "I" don't know what my cerebellum has discarded, before "I" think it? Before "we" think it? Heaven help us all.
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It'll be fine unless someone figures out how to read the discarded speculative conclusions in a predictable fashion.
It makes sense. (Score:5, Interesting)
When *I* was in schools the known function of the cerebellum was shaping what would otherwise be ballistic movement. Say you reach out to touch a dot at arm's length; your finger traces a smooth, precise, efficient curve. Without the cerebellum you'd just fling your arm in the general direction of the dot. We were taught the crebellum was a like an enormous, high speed, nerve impulse shaping co-processor. The structure of the cerebellum is kind of like a co-processor, lots of similar looking, repeating modular units.
The motor-only view of the cerebellum has been obsolete for 20 years or more. In any case it always seemed curious to me that such a large brain structure would be dedicated to that movement shaping function; it's not as if human gross movements are any more complex than other animals.
Maybe the cerebellum originally evolved to shape physical movement, but evolution is the ultimate hacker; it doesn't care what things are for, it cares what can be done with them. It's a bit like building supercomputers from GPUs; it's not what GPUs used to be for, but it works.
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The standard theory of the cerebellum is to model the interior and exterior world so that reaction times are not 400 ms long, but, typically, much shorter, and that the control system for *any* movement -- not just ballistic movements, of which I believe there are now thought to be exactly zero, as even saccades have a modium of in-flight feeback control -- can be made that much tighter. We see the effects during external perturbations of movements when the cerebellar model fails and the long-latency propr
Really rough analogy (Score:2)
Really rough analogy: cerebellum is the CPU, cerebrum is the GPU. Other stuff is networking.
Did they use proper controls this time? (Score:2)
Because without those, you can detect brain activity in a dead fish by fMRI.
https://www.wired.com/2009/09/... [wired.com]
Biologists ... what else are they wrong about? (Score:2)
Which is fine if not for the fact that medicine draws absolute conclusions that affect you based on incomplete knowledge.
But that's science right?
And how much do we really know about the atmosphere and climate? And yet engineers and scientists are stepping up with "solutions".
It's not that science is incomplete, it's that people (profiteers and politicians) will try and make you believe it is.