What are the parts of the lizard brain?

[Ed_Pell]

I like Bitking’s dumb boss theory. Which leads me to want to know the parts of the lizard brain. So far, I know thalamus and hippocampus.

[Bitking]

This is one of a list of projects; these are the current areas where I am making drawings and assembling notes:

• the lizard brain from the tip of the toe through to the forebrain with details of the lizard brain command structures.
• the interaction between the lizard brain and the cortex. Lots of drawings needed here. This also gets heavily into the counterflow of information back down towards the sensory streams.
• the capture and formation of semantic content from the sensory stream through to the temporal lobe. This involves considerably more on the WHAT and WHERE streams.
• The formation and properties of the Global Workspace.
• The various functions of the mix of neuron morphologies in the cortex with inter-structure connections and likely resulting functions.

I have ideas how I want to expose my thoughts on these areas. Many of these concepts do not seem to have a good visual component and I am still working out how to present them in an approachable way.

I can try to bump the project labeled WWALD (What Would A LIzard Do?) towards the top of the list but this will still take a while - day job and all that.

As you may have noticed - I have been cleaning up the first draft of the HTML Columns into Grids! post as I compare it to my notes and see the bits I missed. It’s up to 64 edits at this moment and I still am going through stacks of notes to compare what I put down with what I have been thinking; I keep finding bits that I feel are important that had completely slipped my mind when I started typing.

Sigh.

BTW - a lot of the bits and pieces have already been posted in a preliminary form on this forum in scattered posts. If you don’t want to wait you can see an outline of where I am going with this stuff.

Could Nociceptor be relevant/critical to developing intelligence?

My take is that the old brain structures are configured to work somewhat like a Hopfield or Boltzmann network with each of the nodes being one of the basic behavior states like feeding, fleeing, fighting, mating, seeking shelter, sleeping, drinking, exploring, grooming, nesting, whatever else you can think of. The various body sensors are inputs to this tipping the current state to whatever has the strongest input. The sensory system has memory associated with it that registers the elements of…

Thoughts on multiple pathways for sensory input into the neocortex

It seems to be a thing for connectome/cortex researchers to ignore the processing that goes on in the “lower” brain structures. These were/are sufficient to run lizards and amphibians. There is absolutely no reason to think that they re not performing much of their original functions inside of the functioning brain. The lower brain receives a low-resolution image from the eye area “away” from the fovea and directs the eye to point at interesting areas to form identification of an object with a …

Somatosensory Cortex References

You may wish to start with the vestibular system. I have a bunch of papers on the contributions of a stabilized platform (the vestibular system) as the starting point of self-reference - but you may wish to start with this one. What happens if it is broken? This is closely related to Depersonalization: Update: I did a little digging and ran across this text. Considering the question you are asking about the system organization of the motor system I think you will be interested in th…

Somatosensory Cortex References

The sense of the body starts with the vestibular system and continues using joint angles and postures, starting with the head: http://www.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/jn.00988.2002 Look at this description of the top end of the posture and motor control system in the basal ganglia. Note that this has taps from the vestibular system not mentioned in this article: Eventually, this works through the posture system and runs down the spine which is a powerful processor in its own right: …

Somatosensory Cortex References

I bumped into this today. It seems nicely topical to your interest. This paper goes into good detail on how much of the heavy lifting is done by subcortical structures. Functional Neuroanatomy for Posture and Gait Control - Kaoru Takakusaki Running the body is insanely complicated - and something that most nubie researchers discount as a minor detail.

[Ed_Pell]

All good, I would pic almost reverse order

neuron morphologies … inter-structure connections
global workspace
lizard brain command structures
interaction between lizard brain and cortex

[Bitking]

The problem with the “morphologies” item is that it strongly treads on Numenta holy ground, in particular, the basic functions of the column in the HTM cannon.

I would like to paint the picture of how the bits fit together first so the functions of the lower-level structure have a conceptual framework to fit into.

The Numenta people have been pushing the H part of HTM away for a long time. As such I don’t see much attention on what the various parts of the column are doing to support these connections.

Many of the interactions with the older brain structures seem to suggest longer range interactions for pattern recognizing and generalization and away from trying to making columns recognize coffee cups all by themselves. This contradicts much of what I am seeing coming out of Jeff’s group and is not likely to be received well.

With this in mind, I want to have my ducks in a row before putting this bit out there.

[jimmyw]

I’d be really interested to read all this, it’s fascinating stuff and I generally enjoy your posts.

This contradicts much of what I am seeing coming out of Jeff’s group and is not likely to be received well.

I can’t speak for them, but I know if I were working at Numenta I’d welcome any outside criticism that steered me toward a more correct theory.

[Ed_Pell]

Here is a paper with much detail on the thalamus.

ThalamusComputationArxiv.pdf

[rhyolight]

I love that you guys are having this discussion, but I’m going to move it into #other-topics:community-lounge because I like to keep the #htm-theory:neuroscience forum associated with HTM-related things.

[Bitking]

Jim,

Jeff and crew are investing a bunch of time and energy into the model as defined. This is going as far as presenting papers and videos so there is now considerable at stake in the stated position.

I am coming from the place of some yahoo on a forum shouting wild claims like “you got it all wrong!” I would expect considerable push-back from this. Really - I assume that they are getting arrows from every direction now - even if it was 100% correct. Another one from me is just noise at this point.

I have to make sure that what I have to say is absolutely correct and unassailable before rocking the boat.