Subcortical and cerebellar volume differences in bilingual and monolingual children: An ABCD study – brain explodes. I have so many thoughts about this. First, this suggests that native bilinguals store less of their object representation information in the DCN/cerebellum, and more of their object information in limbic/cerebral areas. HOW COOL IS THAT? The idea that language learning imparts a dorsal/ventral bias to brain function is a hard indication that dorsal/ventral stream processing biases are flexible, rather than fixed (at least in children!).
It also suggests that all language attaches to internal metaphors, rather than the commonly held conceit that we require language to generate metaphors. It suggests that we train in a ventral bias with our education system, and this training is why association of disparate context is hard for most people to grasp.
This also suggests that my assumption about flavors of “autism” being simply a strongly innate dorsal/ventral bias compared to the norm is probably wrong, and that there is some other mechanic underneath which drives the dorsal/ventral presentation. I’m wondering if the unknown perturber here is immune/microglial function?
The Cerebellum and Cognitive Function: Anatomical Evidence from a Transdiagnostic Sample – Another brain explosion, and one that makes sense in context. The big thing, the correlation coefficient of .89 for “cognitive flexibility” is pretty “wow!”. Let’s test this against the various measures of “creativity” which exist by using stimulation techniques. This has the potential to be a really interesting path. It also suggests that there might be two wholly different mechanics for cognitive flexibility being blurred.