This question may be unanswerable at this time because data for cerebellar and brain stem contributions is unavailable, but this has bugged me for quite some time.Why aren’t all brains autodidactic “polymath” by default? It seems pretty likely that there is a gating mechanism being enforced somewhere on our ability to learn that is invisible to us for the most part, and this gating mechanism has multiple system level components.The first mechanism which kind of pops out is something which enforces learning to include a social component specifically. Culturally we build our society around this concept and whether we teach through formal schools or social transmission, nearly all “learning”, particularly those which shape deeply held beliefs, are bound to a strong social component.Kind of drifting here, but it seems that historically schools/formalized education may be the bit of magic that has allowed humans to so dramatically exceed the Dunbar number. It seems possible that humans have managed to hijack this social information download/upload ability to greatly expand the complexity of social rule sets. Great apes when exposed to formalized training undergo pretty dramatic behavioral shifts, especially compared to “wild” or untrained conspecifics. I’m curious if after a few generations of formalized training for an entire troop of bonobos would they develop similar social structures to neolithic humans?Back to humans, why is it so fantastically rare to self teach any concept, and even rarer to gain true expertise without direct social interaction? The concept of a monolithic field of expertise, that one can only gain expertise as part of a lifetime of practice is literally the opposite of how humans think plasticity works.I’m wondering if our understanding of learning is flawed. Perhaps most brains never gain actual systemic understanding of things, they merely accumulate experience. “Expertise” under this concept is completely analogous to “experience”.Conversely, are people who have the ability to demonstrate proficiency without experience lacking that bound connection to the experience?Is this the underlying trait of genetic “autism”? Individuals who’s primacy in binding is to external stimuli/objects themselves rather than internal social context?Edit: Bit of a mini-research project I need to follow up on regarding this, can the hippocampal stapling mechanism occur in the CA3 as well? How would ventral vs. dorsal hippocampal stream dominance look in each of these four conditions? Does the stapling mechanism occur in both regions at the same time and become reconciled elsewhere? Could it vary by valence calculation?