I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
Psalm 139:14
"The human brain keeps surprising scientists with its unfathomable complexity as well as its nifty algorithms.
The cerebellum, or “little brain” located next to the brain stem, has gotten short shrift for years compared to its superior, the cerebral cortex with all those folds of gray matter. Scientists at SDSU are finding out it is more complex than expected. It now is seen as a highly versatile portion of the brain with complexity of its surface giving the cerebral cortex a run for its money.
Many readers may be unfamiliar with the “thalamic reticular nucleus” or TRN. It is “believed to act as a gatekeeper for sensory information flowing to the cortex,” this article says. Problems with this region seem to be associated with autism and other attention disorders.
Scientists are finding that the brain constructs physical maps (like paths through a city) and virtual maps (like social networks) in much the same manner. This is because we typically sample a space and infer relationships between samples. Participants given network puzzles to solve were found to build them piecemeal, whether they were physical or virtual networks. Solving the networks called on secondary players in the brain:
Psalm 139:14
"The human brain keeps surprising scientists with its unfathomable complexity as well as its nifty algorithms.
The cerebellum, or “little brain” located next to the brain stem, has gotten short shrift for years compared to its superior, the cerebral cortex with all those folds of gray matter. Scientists at SDSU are finding out it is more complex than expected. It now is seen as a highly versatile portion of the brain with complexity of its surface giving the cerebral cortex a run for its money.
It’s essentially a flat sheet with the thickness of a crepe, crinkled into hundreds of folds to make it fit into a compactThe scientists in the article are calling the cerebellum “quite the jack of all trades” because of its “versatile role, contributing to our five senses as well as pain, movements, thought, and emotion.”
volume about one-eighth the volume of the cerebral cortex. For this reason, the surface area of the cerebellum was thought to be considerably smaller than that of the cerebral cortex.
By using an ultra-high-field 9.4 Tesla MRI machine to scan the brain and custom software to process the resulting images, an SDSU neuroimaging expert discovered the tightly packed folds actually contain a surface area equal to 80% of the cerebral cortex’s surface area.
Many readers may be unfamiliar with the “thalamic reticular nucleus” or TRN. It is “believed to act as a gatekeeper for sensory information flowing to the cortex,” this article says. Problems with this region seem to be associated with autism and other attention disorders.
When sensory input from the eyes, ears, or other sensory organs arrives in our brains, it goes first to the thalamus, which then relays it to the cortex for higher-level processing. Impairments of these thalamo-cortical circuits can lead to attention deficits, hypersensitivity to noise and other stimuli, and sleep problems.When functioning correctly, the TRN serves its users well by “blocking out distracting sensory input.” Without that filter, we could easily be overwhelmed with sensations coming too fast to process.
Scientists are finding that the brain constructs physical maps (like paths through a city) and virtual maps (like social networks) in much the same manner. This is because we typically sample a space and infer relationships between samples. Participants given network puzzles to solve were found to build them piecemeal, whether they were physical or virtual networks. Solving the networks called on secondary players in the brain:
They were later asked about relationships between newWe tend to fit new data around a template with a few landmarks, and build up a “map” that can integrate new data into the template. It’s an intelligent way to design, the team found:
pairs of people in the grid while the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity. Without being prompted, based only on pairwise comparisons, the volunteers organized the information into a two-dimensional grid in their brains. This two-dimensional map was present across three brain regions called the hippocampus, entorhinal cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex/medial orbitofrontal cortex.
That allows us to quickly adapt to a new situation based on past experience. This may help to explain humans’ remarkable flexibility in generalizing experiences from one task to another, a key challenge in artificial intelligence research.CEH
“We know a lot about how the neural codes for representing physical space,” Boorman said. “It looks like the human brain uses the same codes to organize abstract, nonspatial information as well.”
