Introducing the enlarging brain: human cerebellum different (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 13, 2020, 20:13 (1406 days ago) @ dhw

QUOTE: “We hypothesize that the cerebellum builds internal action models of our social inter-actions to predict how other people’s actions will be executed, what our most likely responses are to these actions, so that we can automatize our interactions and instantly detect disruptions in these action sequences. This mechanism likely allows to better anticipate action sequences during social interactions in an automatic and intuitive way and to fine-tune these anticipations, making it easier to understand behaviors and to detect violations.”

dhw: I find the hypothesis very difficult to follow. It seems to be saying that the fortune-telling cerebellum automatically predicts other people’s behaviour as well as our own, but then “we” detect disruptions and something or the other fine-tunes the predictions….so that something or the other understands it all. I’m afraid I don’t. "Allows to better...." is an extraordinary construction clearly designed to avoid telling us what does the "bettering".

Unfortunately I have access only to the abstract, with a huge payment to see the article itself. Since it is peer reviewed the hypothesis was not rejected as you try to do. I read it as suggesting we can anticipate another person's reactions in general as we all do today.

DAVID: For dhw this raises a question. The enlargement to the sapiens' size involved primarily the cerebral prefrontal and frontal cortex to enlarge. One wonders which erectus neuron cell committee handled the cerebellar changes. The cerebellar changes appear to show planning for human socializing. Did the erectus brain cells know that was coming and how would they know to arrange for changes in the cerebellum?

dhw: My first question is what the hypothesis is trying to prove. Secondly, erectus was a social being, so exactly what changes do you think took place between his cerebellum and ours? If changes did take place, they would have been handled by the cell community of the cerebellum, in response to changes in human socializing. I don't know what plans you envisage, unless you think all behaviour is predestined and your God planted programmes 3.8 billion years ago to tell everybody what to do if so and so did such and such. And I have no idea what this has to do with brain expansion. All such hypotheses (the article does not deal in facts) raise the question of how material cells produce immaterial thoughts.

Since we cannot see erectus brain material, nor any other previous fossil brains, all we can discuss is how sapiens developed from our ancestor ape. The size of cerebellums did not change much, but did reorganize to a degree according to the monkey/macaque article. We cannot know how much complexification on its own occurs in cerebella. This research in cerebellar functions is all new and very incomplete. But it is starting to show how much change was involved in finally producing the sapiens advanced brain , and not just extra cortex. dhw and I will always continue to disagree about God's role.