Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
[...] In a study that appeared last week (October 25) in Neuron, Dosenbach and his colleagues report what those late-night data reveal about the cerebellum, a region nestled underneath the cerebral cortex at the back of the skull. Their results suggest the anatomy of this region is highly individual, and that it is involved in not only coordinating and smoothing out physical movement—its most famous function—but in running quality control of our thoughts.
[...] And in the Midnight Scan Club data, activity in cortical areas associated with those higher cognitive functions was soon followed by activity in connected regions of the cerebellum, revealing integrated networks between the two, the authors say. "The regions that are involved in these executive functions . . . in the cerebellum, they temporally lag behind the cortex by several hundred milliseconds," says Scott Marek, a postdoc in Dosenbach's lab and first author on the study. He thinks nascent thoughts are relayed from the cortex to the cerebellum, which "has some sort of internal model about how the world should be, and if [the signals are] correct, great, the output goes out, but if not, then those signals get relayed back to the cerebral cortex to adjust the output."
In essence, the cerebellum appears to be performing quality control over our thinking—something it's already known to do for motor functions. Fiez says other neuroscientists had suspected it does so in higher cognitive functions, and she agrees with Marek that the new results are evidence for that hypothesis.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 08 2018, @12:24PM (3 children)
The assumption is that one is intelligent enough to have thoughts. Mostly true, but not in all cases.
For instance, the cerebellum of His Orangeness fans is damned for all time to stay unused - they are beyond thinking, they live mystical experiences towards The Orange Representation of Their God (yes, I'm looking at you, bradley12 and jMo)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 08 2018, @12:32PM (2 children)
'tis curious dat ze word "quantum" doesnt show up ... or is observed anywhere :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 08 2018, @12:39PM (1 child)
The cat swallowed it, maybe perhaps.
And now the cat is in an indeterminate state; until observed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 08 2018, @02:37PM
dr. lectors cat was observed licking the plates clean ...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 08 2018, @03:19PM (1 child)
In other words, prejudices.
In other words, if your thoughts don't fit your prejudices, they are rejected by your brain's quality control.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 08 2018, @06:13PM
That comment literally took the story, and substituted some kind of judgmental term, "prejudices".
That's not worthy of an upmod, let alone "interesting".
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Thursday November 08 2018, @03:35PM (1 child)
Parabellum will do quality control on your cerebellum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9%C3%9719mm_Parabellum [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday November 08 2018, @06:13PM
So can Lady Antebellum [wikipedia.org].
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by garfiejas on Thursday November 08 2018, @06:44PM (1 child)
The functional concept (SAS) has been around a while (1980) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervisory_attentional_system/ [wikipedia.org] and this (directly related) research a few weeks; but it's not until I saw the SN headline that I managed to put the two together, which is surprising (or not) since I do active research in this area; an open question has always been where, if it exists, is the SAS located :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 08 2018, @09:33PM
I have a friend who had magnetic shunts surgically implanted into his 4th ventricle due to hydrocephalus and a chiari malformation. He now has an amazing ability to guess peoples birthdays and says he can feel the shunt constrict when he is thinking of the right date.