:Melody, what we're seeing can't be the real story, only the tiniest fraction of it.  What we're seeing is not like how brains work inside.  It's too large an edifice of knowledge, I can't start to explain it in order, but maybe I can send over the experience of what it would be like to know:

and Thellim tries to put more power behind her Mindspeech, send more of the contents of her frontal cortex and all its associations, as she thinks in swift review

:light enters retina, preprocessed, edge cells, bar detectors, down the vast neural cable to the lateral geniculate nucleus (the centers of the brain are older evolutionarily than outer parts and form something like a complete system on their own because they're relics of a time when other parts of the system didn't exist), onward to the visual cortex; the visual cortex has different areas for textures and colors even though we experience seeing them both together and at once; this is the hyperbolic mapping between the actual visual field and its representation in the visual cortex that assigns processing power in inverse proportion to how close an object is to the center of vision; an example seen in a neuroscience textbook of what lights up in a monkey's visual cortex when it looks at a grid, the distortion of that grid; the internal coding of brains does not look like what we experience ourselves seeing; spatial locations and forms in the parietal lobe, recognition of objects in the temporal lobe; the brain divides up internal labor along dimensions that are nothing like we experience ourselves when we're dividing up a problem to think about it, based around the dimensions of low-level properties of things rather than their higher-level uses and categories; here is the cerebellum, vast and central to all cognition, the control of realtime motor patterns including the motor patterns of thinking themselves; here is a cerebellar chip, a tiny thing that attends to incoming sequences of neural pulses encoding the vastly reduced-dimensional sense inputs that are relevant to its job alone, sending out one part of motor impulses to be combined with many others; here are the parallel fibers, showing that chip a hundred thousand input lines that might be relevant to it, the synaptic density here is higher than any other known part of the brain; here is the climbing fiber's error signal, to tell the cerebellar chip when the larger system knows a mistake has happened, it is theorized that the cerebellar chip takes the error signal and tries to correlate it with the parallel fibers' inputs to produce a corrected signal using those inputs; if that happens often, the balance of the signaling algorithm will be at the point where the derivative is zero, balancing the net magnitude of pushes in both directions to remain roughly stationary (this is calculus, by the way, but it's not important right now); here's some of my experience writing computer programs as a kid, and what that metaphorically implies about how often the brain must be translating thoughts between one format and another; it's theorized that cortex began as a convergence space for sensory information, frontal cortex is executive in the simplified stories they tell to children, but thinking is a realtime control skill so probably a lot of the real work is done in the cerebellum; the frontal cortex is much larger in humans than in chimpanzees; records of what happens with blindness show that different parts of the cerebral cortex can take on other parts work; it's theorized that there's a common algorithm that the whole vast cerebral cortex begins from, here's the six-layer structure that appears everywhere, here's the rather informal theory about hierarchical temporal patterns; brain damage is endlessly fascinating but it's like trying to understand a radio by ripping particular circuits out of it; when the hippocampus is destroyed people can't form new memories but they can still retrieve old ones; damage to the brain here can cause people to believe everybody around them has been replaced by impostors, because they see the face but get no sense of recognition; brain damage here can cause people to lose the ability to control their left arm, and also vigorously deny that their arm is paralyzed, but if you squirt cold water in their left ear they may become able to know:

:Brains are complicated, brains were never made by humans, and brains' inner stories don't look like what humans experience or the stories they tell themselves.  What you saw can't be what's really happening.:

:Melody, what we're seeing can't be the real story, only the tiniest fraction of it.  What we're seeing is not like how brains work inside.  It's too large an edifice of knowledge, I can't start to explain it in order, but maybe I can send over the experience of what it would be like to know:

and Thellim tries to put more power behind her Mindspeech, send more of the contents of her frontal cortex and all its associations, as she thinks in swift review

:light enters retina, preprocessed, edge cells, bar detectors, down the vast neural cable to the lateral geniculate nucleus (the centers of the brain are older evolutionarily than outer parts and form something like a complete system on their own because they're relics of a time when other parts of the system didn't exist), onward to the visual cortex; the visual cortex has different areas for textures and colors even though we experience seeing them both together and at once; this is the hyperbolic mapping between the actual visual field and its representation in the visual cortex that assigns processing power in inverse proportion to how close an object is to the center of vision; an example seen in a neuroscience textbook of what lights up in a monkey's visual cortex when it looks at a grid, the distortion of that grid; the internal coding of brains does not look like what we experience ourselves seeing; spatial locations and forms in the parietal lobe, recognition of objects in the temporal lobe; the brain divides up internal labor along dimensions that are nothing like we experience ourselves when we're dividing up a problem to think about it, based around the dimensions of low-level properties of things rather than their higher-level uses and categories; here is the cerebellum, vast and central to all cognition, the control of realtime motor patterns including the motor patterns of thinking themselves; here is a cerebellar chip, a tiny thing that attends to incoming sequences of neural pulses encoding the vastly reduced-dimensional sense inputs that are relevant to its job alone, sending out one part of motor impulses to be combined with many others; here are the parallel fibers, showing that chip a hundred thousand input lines that might be relevant to it, the synaptic density here is higher than any other known part of the brain; here is the climbing fiber's error signal, to tell the cerebellar chip when the larger system knows a mistake has happened, it is theorized that the cerebellar chip takes the error signal and tries to correlate it with the parallel fibers' inputs to produce a corrected signal using those inputs; if that happens often, the balance of the signaling algorithm will be at the point where the derivative is zero, balancing the net magnitude of pushes in both directions to remain roughly stationary (this is calculus, by the way, but it's not important right now); here's some of my experience writing computer programs as a kid, and what that metaphorically implies about how often the brain must be translating thoughts between one format and another; it's theorized that cortex began as a convergence space for sensory information, frontal cortex is executive in the simplified stories they tell to children, but thinking is a realtime control skill so probably a lot of the real work is done in the cerebellum; the frontal cortex is much larger in humans than in chimpanzees; records of what happens with blindness show that different parts of the cerebral cortex can take on other parts work; it's theorized that there's a common algorithm that the whole vast cerebral cortex begins from, here's the six-layer structure that appears everywhere, here's the rather informal theory about hierarchical temporal patterns; brain damage is endlessly fascinating but it's like trying to understand a radio by ripping particular circuits out of it; when the hippocampus is destroyed people can't form new memories but they can still retrieve old ones; damage to the brain here can cause people to believe everybody around them has been replaced by impostors, because they see the face but get no sense of recognition; brain damage here can cause people to lose the ability to control their left arm, and also vigorously deny that their arm is paralyzed, but if you squirt cold water in their left ear they may become able to know:

:Brains are complicated, brains were never made by humans, and brains' inner stories don't look like what humans experience or the stories they tell themselves.  What you saw can't be what's really happening.:

:Melody, what we're seeing can't be the real story, only the tiniest fraction of it.  What we're seeing is not like how brains work inside.  It's too large an edifice of knowledge, I can't start to explain it in order, but maybe I can send over the experience of what it would be like to know, you won't get the knowledge but maybe you'll know what it would feel like to have it:

and Thellim tries to put more power behind her Mindspeech, send more of the contents of her frontal cortex and all its associations, as she thinks in swift review

:light enters retina, preprocessed, edge cells, bar detectors, down the vast neural cable to the lateral geniculate nucleus (the centers of the brain are older evolutionarily than outer parts and form something like a complete system on their own because they're relics of a time when other parts of the system didn't exist), onward to the visual cortex; the visual cortex has different areas for textures and colors even though we experience seeing them both together and at once; this is the hyperbolic mapping between the actual visual field and its representation in the visual cortex that assigns processing power in inverse proportion to how close an object is to the center of vision; an example seen in a neuroscience textbook of what lights up in a monkey's visual cortex when it looks at a grid, the distortion of that grid; the internal coding of brains does not look like what we experience ourselves seeing; spatial locations and forms in the parietal lobe, recognition of objects in the temporal lobe; the brain divides up internal labor along dimensions that are nothing like we experience ourselves when we're dividing up a problem to think about it, based around the dimensions of low-level properties of things rather than their higher-level uses and categories; here is the cerebellum, vast and central to all cognition, the control of realtime motor patterns including the motor patterns of thinking themselves; here is a cerebellar chip, a tiny thing that attends to incoming sequences of neural pulses encoding the vastly reduced-dimensional sense inputs that are relevant to its job alone, sending out one part of motor impulses to be combined with many others; here are the parallel fibers, showing that chip a hundred thousand input lines that might be relevant to it, the synaptic density here is higher than any other known part of the brain; here is the climbing fiber's error signal, to tell the cerebellar chip when the larger system knows a mistake has happened, it is theorized that the cerebellar chip takes the error signal and tries to correlate it with the parallel fibers' inputs to produce a corrected signal using those inputs; if that happens often, the balance of the signaling algorithm will be at the point where the derivative is zero, balancing the net magnitude of pushes in both directions to remain roughly stationary (this is calculus, by the way, but it's not important right now); here's some of my experience writing computer programs as a kid, and what that metaphorically implies about how often the brain must be translating thoughts between one format and another; it's theorized that cortex began as a convergence space for sensory information, frontal cortex is executive in the simplified stories they tell to children, but thinking is a realtime control skill so probably a lot of the real work is done in the cerebellum; the frontal cortex is much larger in humans than in chimpanzees; records of what happens with blindness show that different parts of the cerebral cortex can take on other parts work; it's theorized that there's a common algorithm that the whole vast cerebral cortex begins from, here's the six-layer structure that appears everywhere, here's the rather informal theory about hierarchical temporal patterns; brain damage is endlessly fascinating but it's like trying to understand a radio by ripping particular circuits out of it; when the hippocampus is destroyed people can't form new memories but they can still retrieve old ones; damage to the brain here can cause people to believe everybody around them has been replaced by impostors, because they see the face but get no sense of recognition; brain damage here can cause people to lose the ability to control their left arm, and also vigorously deny that their arm is paralyzed, but if you squirt cold water in their left ear they may become able to know:

:Brains are complicated, brains were never made by humans, and brains' inner stories don't look like what humans experience or the stories they tell themselves.  What you saw can't be what's really happening.:

:Melody, what we're seeing can't be the real story, only the tiniest fraction of it.  What we're seeing is not like how brains work inside.  It's too large an edifice of knowledge, I can't start to explain it in order, but maybe I can send over the experience of what it would be like to know, you may not get the knowledge but maybe you'll know what it would feel like to have it.:

and Thellim tries to put more power behind her Mindspeech, send more of the contents of her frontal cortex and all its associations, as she thinks in swift review

:light enters retina, preprocessed, edge cells, bar detectors, down the vast neural cable to the lateral geniculate nucleus (the centers of the brain are older evolutionarily than outer parts and form something like a complete system on their own because they're relics of a time when other parts of the system didn't exist), onward to the visual cortex; the visual cortex has different areas for textures and colors even though we experience seeing them both together and at once; this is the hyperbolic mapping between the actual visual field and its representation in the visual cortex that assigns processing power in inverse proportion to how close an object is to the center of vision; an example seen in a neuroscience textbook of what lights up in a monkey's visual cortex when it looks at a grid, the distortion of that grid; the internal coding of brains does not look like what we experience ourselves seeing; spatial locations and forms in the parietal lobe, recognition of objects in the temporal lobe; the brain divides up internal labor along dimensions that are nothing like we experience ourselves when we're dividing up a problem to think about it, based around the dimensions of low-level properties of things rather than their higher-level uses and categories; here is the cerebellum, vast and central to all cognition, the control of realtime motor patterns including the motor patterns of thinking themselves; here is a cerebellar chip, a tiny thing that attends to incoming sequences of neural pulses encoding the vastly reduced-dimensional sense inputs that are relevant to its job alone, sending out one part of motor impulses to be combined with many others; here are the parallel fibers, showing that chip a hundred thousand input lines that might be relevant to it, the synaptic density here is higher than any other known part of the brain; here is the climbing fiber's error signal, to tell the cerebellar chip when the larger system knows a mistake has happened, it is theorized that the cerebellar chip takes the error signal and tries to correlate it with the parallel fibers' inputs to produce a corrected signal using those inputs; if that happens often, the balance of the signaling algorithm will be at the point where the derivative is zero, balancing the net magnitude of pushes in both directions to remain roughly stationary (this is calculus, by the way, but it's not important right now); here's some of my experience writing computer programs as a kid, and what that metaphorically implies about how often the brain must be translating thoughts between one format and another; it's theorized that cortex began as a convergence space for sensory information, frontal cortex is executive in the simplified stories they tell to children, but thinking is a realtime control skill so probably a lot of the real work is done in the cerebellum; the frontal cortex is much larger in humans than in chimpanzees; records of what happens with blindness show that different parts of the cerebral cortex can take on other parts work; it's theorized that there's a common algorithm that the whole vast cerebral cortex begins from, here's the six-layer structure that appears everywhere, here's the rather informal theory about hierarchical temporal patterns; brain damage is endlessly fascinating but it's like trying to understand a radio by ripping particular circuits out of it; when the hippocampus is destroyed people can't form new memories but they can still retrieve old ones; damage to the brain here can cause people to believe everybody around them has been replaced by impostors, because they see the face but get no sense of recognition; brain damage here can cause people to lose the ability to control their left arm, and also vigorously deny that their arm is paralyzed, but if you squirt cold water in their left ear they may become able to know:

:Brains are complicated, brains were never made by humans, and brains' inner stories don't look like what humans experience or the stories they tell themselves.  What you saw can't be what's really happening.:

:Melody, what we're seeing can't be the real story, only the tiniest fraction of it.  What we're seeing is not like how brains work inside.  It's too large an edifice of knowledge, I can't start to explain it in order, but maybe I can send over the experience of what it would be like to know, you may not get the knowledge but maybe you'll know what it would feel like to have it.:

and Thellim tries to put more power behind her Mindspeech, send more of the contents of her frontal cortex and all its associations, as she thinks in swift review

:light enters retina, preprocessed, edge cells, bar detectors, down the vast neural cable to the lateral geniculate nucleus (the centers of the brain are older evolutionarily than outer parts and form something like a complete system on their own because they're relics of a time when other parts of the system didn't exist), onward to the visual cortex; the visual cortex has different areas for textures and colors even though we experience seeing them both together and at once; this is the hyperbolic mapping between the actual visual field and its representation in the visual cortex that assigns processing power in proportion to how close an object is to the center of vision; an example seen in a neuroscience textbook of what lights up in a monkey's visual cortex when it looks at a grid, the distortion of that grid, the internal coding of brains does not look like what we experience ourselves seeing; spatial locations and forms in the parietal lobe, recognition of objects in the temporal lobe; the brain divides up internal labor along dimensions that are nothing like we experience ourselves when we're dividing up a problem to think about it, based around the dimensions of low-level properties of things rather than their higher-level uses and categories; here is the cerebellum, vast and central to all cognition, the control of realtime motor patterns including the motor patterns of thinking themselves; here is a cerebellar chip, a tiny thing that attends to incoming sequences of neural pulses encoding the vastly reduced-dimensional sense inputs that are relevant to its job alone, sending out one part of motor impulses to be combined with many others; here are the parallel fibers, showing that chip a hundred thousand input lines that might be relevant to it, the synaptic density here is higher than any other known part of the brain; here is the climbing fiber's error signal, to tell the cerebellar chip when the larger system knows a mistake has happened, it is theorized that the cerebellar chip takes the error signal and tries to correlate it with the parallel fibers' inputs to produce a corrected signal using those inputs; if that happens often, the balance of the signaling algorithm will be at the point where the derivative is zero, balancing the net magnitude of pushes in both directions to remain roughly stationary (this is calculus, by the way, but it's not important right now); here's some of my experience writing computer programs as a kid, and what that metaphorically implies about how often the brain must be translating thoughts between one format and another; it's theorized that cortex began as a convergence space for sensory information, frontal cortex is executive in the simplified stories they tell to children, but thinking is a realtime control skill so probably a lot of the real work is done in the cerebellum; the frontal cortex is much larger in humans than in chimpanzees; records of what happens with blindness show that different parts of the cerebral cortex can take on other parts work; it's theorized that there's a common algorithm that the whole vast cerebral cortex begins from, here's the six-layer structure that appears everywhere, here's the rather informal theory about hierarchical temporal patterns; brain damage is endlessly fascinating but it's like trying to understand a radio by ripping particular circuits out of it; when the hippocampus is destroyed people can't form new memories but they can still retrieve old ones; damage to the brain here can cause people to believe everybody around them has been replaced by impostors, because they see the face but get no sense of recognition; brain damage here can cause people to lose the ability to control their left arm, and also vigorously deny that their arm is paralyzed, but if you squirt cold water in their left ear they may become able to know:

:Brains are complicated, brains were never made by humans, and brains' inner stories don't look like what humans experience or the stories they tell themselves.  What you saw can't be what's really happening.:

:Melody, what we're seeing can't be the real story, only the tiniest fraction of it.  What we're seeing is not like how brains work inside.  It's too large an edifice of knowledge, I can't start to explain it in order, but maybe I can send over the experience of what it would be like to know, you may not get the knowledge but maybe you'll know what it would feel like to have it:

and Thellim tries to put more power behind her Mindspeech, send more of the contents of her frontal cortex and all its associations, as she thinks in swift review

:light enters retina, preprocessed, edge cells, bar detectors, down the vast neural cable to the lateral geniculate nucleus (the centers of the brain are older evolutionarily than outer parts and form something like a complete system on their own because they're relics of a time when other parts of the system didn't exist), onward to the visual cortex; the visual cortex has different areas for textures and colors even though we experience seeing them both together and at once; this is the hyperbolic mapping between the actual visual field and its representation in the visual cortex that assigns processing power in proportion to how close an object is to the center of vision; an example seen in a neuroscience textbook of what lights up in a monkey's visual cortex when it looks at a grid, the distortion of that grid, the internal coding of brains does not look like what we experience ourselves seeing; spatial locations and forms in the parietal lobe, recognition of objects in the temporal lobe; the brain divides up internal labor along dimensions that are nothing like we experience ourselves when we're dividing up a problem to think about it, based around the dimensions of low-level properties of things rather than their higher-level uses and categories; here is the cerebellum, vast and central to all cognition, the control of realtime motor patterns including the motor patterns of thinking themselves; here is a cerebellar chip, a tiny thing that attends to incoming sequences of neural pulses encoding the vastly reduced-dimensional sense inputs that are relevant to its job alone, sending out one part of motor impulses to be combined with many others; here are the parallel fibers, showing that chip a hundred thousand input lines that might be relevant to it, the synaptic density here is higher than any other known part of the brain; here is the climbing fiber's error signal, to tell the cerebellar chip when the larger system knows a mistake has happened, it is theorized that the cerebellar chip takes the error signal and tries to correlate it with the parallel fibers' inputs to produce a corrected signal using those inputs; if that happens often, the balance of the signaling algorithm will be at the point where the derivative is zero, balancing the net magnitude of pushes in both directions to remain roughly stationary (this is calculus, by the way, but it's not important right now); here's some of my experience writing computer programs as a kid, and what that metaphorically implies about how often the brain must be translating thoughts between one format and another; it's theorized that cortex began as a convergence space for sensory information, frontal cortex is executive in the simplified stories they tell to children, but thinking is a realtime control skill so probably a lot of the real work is done in the cerebellum; the frontal cortex is much larger in humans than in chimpanzees; records of what happens with blindness show that different parts of the cerebral cortex can take on other parts work; it's theorized that there's a common algorithm that the whole vast cerebral cortex begins from, here's the six-layer structure that appears everywhere, here's the rather informal theory about hierarchical temporal patterns; brain damage is endlessly fascinating but it's like trying to understand a radio by ripping particular circuits out of it; when the hippocampus is destroyed people can't form new memories but they can still retrieve old ones; damage to the brain here can cause people to believe everybody around them has been replaced by impostors, because they see the face but get no sense of recognition; brain damage here can cause people to lose the ability to control their left arm, and also vigorously deny that their arm is paralyzed, but if you squirt cold water in their left ear they may become able to know:

:Brains are complicated, brains were never made by humans, and brains' inner stories don't look like what humans experience or the stories they tell themselves.  What you saw can't be what's really happening.:

:Melody, what we're seeing can't be the real story, only the tiniest fraction of it.  What we're seeing is not like how brains work inside.  It's too large an edifice of knowledge, I can't start to explain it in order, but maybe I can send over the experience of what it would be like to know, you may not get the knowledge but maybe you'll know what it would feel like to have it:

and Thellim tries to put more power behind her Mindspeech, send more of the contents of her frontal cortex and all its associations, as she thinks in swift review

:light enters retina, preprocessed, edge cells, bar detectors, down the vast neural cable to the lateral geniculate nucleus (the centers of the brain are older evolutionarily than outer parts and form something like a complete system on their own because they're relics of a time when other parts of the system didn't exist), onward to the visual cortex; the visual cortex has different areas for textures and colors even though we experience seeing them both together and at once; this is the hyperbolic mapping between the actual visual field and its representation in the visual cortex that assigns processing power in proportion to how close an object is to the center of vision; an example seen in a neuroscience textbook of what lights up in a monkey's visual cortex when it looks at a grid, the distortion of that grid, the internal coding of brains does not look like what we experience ourselves seeing; spatial locations and forms in the parietal lobe, recognition of objects in the temporal lobe; the brain divides up internal labor along dimensions that are nothing like we experience ourselves when we're dividing up a problem to think about it, based around the dimensions of low-level properties of things rather than their higher-level uses and categories; here is the cerebellum, vast and central to all cognition, the control of realtime motor patterns including the motor patterns of thinking themselves; here is a cerebellar chip, a tiny thing that attends to incoming sequences of neural pulses encoding the vastly reduced-dimensional sense inputs that are relevant to its job alone, sending out one part of motor impulses to be combined with many others; here are the parallel fibers, showing that chip a hundred thousand input lines that might be relevant to it, the synaptic density here is higher than any other known part of the brain; here is the climbing fiber's error signal, to tell the cerebellar chip when the larger system knows a mistake has happened, it is theorized that the cerebellar chip takes the error signal and tries to correlate it with the parallel fibers' inputs to produce a corrected signal using those inputs; if that happens often, the balance of the signaling algorithm will be at the point where the derivative is zero, balancing the net magnitude of pushes in both directions to remain roughly stationary (this is calculus, by the way, but it's not important right now); here's some of my experience writing computer programs as a kid, and what that metaphorically implies about how often the brain must be translating thoughts between one format and another; it's theorized that cortex began as a convergence space for sensory information, frontal cortex is executive in the simplified stories they tell to children, but thinking is a realtime control skill so probably a lot of the real work is done in the cerebellum; the frontal cortex is much larger in humans than in chimpanzees; records of what happens with blindness show that different parts of the cerebral cortex can take on other parts' work; it's theorized that there's a common algorithm that the whole vast cerebral cortex begins from, here's the six-layer structure that appears everywhere, here's the rather informal theory about hierarchical temporal patterns; brain damage is endlessly fascinating but it's like trying to understand a radio by ripping particular circuits out of it; when the hippocampus is destroyed people can't form new memories but they can still retrieve old ones; damage to the brain here can cause people to believe everybody around them has been replaced by impostors, because they see the face but get no sense of recognition; brain damage here can cause people to lose the ability to control their left arm, and also vigorously deny that their arm is paralyzed, but if you squirt cold water in their left ear they may become able to know:

:Brains are complicated, brains were never made by humans, and brains' inner stories don't look like what humans experience or the stories they tell themselves.  What you saw can't be what's really happening.: