Something which has been bugging me recently is the mechanics of “unconscious” behavior. My current model for this is that unconscious behavior represents well defined engrams for the behavior which needs to be executed, and requires subthreshold energy activation for loading into consciousness. I think current evidence supports the formation of engrams via reverse hebbian processes which pare down the initial hippocampal maps into specific elements. To this point it’s felt like the best description of mechanics, but doesn’t feel right.
I think a better explanation is that the cerebellum and DCN create duplicate activity to cerebral/limbic circuits, except instead of creating maps and refining them via anti-hebbian processes like the hippocampus/cerebrum, it builds specific engrams then uses cerebral data to expand them. This process is the core data contained in the ventral stream. This makes the cerebellum/DCN/ventral stream responsible for specificity, while the cerebrum/limbic/dorsal stream responsible for generalization. I need to figure out a few null hypothesis to test this against now that we have more dorsal vs ventral stream data being generated.
We are only “conscious” of behavior/information when cerebellar/ventral stream data and cerebral/dorsal stream data need to be mapped over each other as part of the hippocampal transform. What we are perceiving is the “difference” between the two streams.
Supporting this, I’m unsurprisingly taking a look at “autism” and specifically Asperger’s. Asperger’s is pretty strongly linked to increased testosterone in utero, (either by genetics or environmental insult like toxoplasmosis), and is the basis of the “extreme male brain” theory of “autism”. Increased in utero testosterone results in changes to cerebellar circuit organization (as well as some brain stem organization issues). Traits of Asperger’s include “clumsiness”, “hyper specificity”, “poor social externalization”. The way that Asperger’s brains build data, starting from a single specific root and building out from that branch is typical ventral stream construction of data, with less access to dorsal fuzzing to expand it. The clumsiness could be an artifact of slow motor cortex circuit timing. There’s quite a body of evidence which supports cerebellar notions of Asperger’s etiology, and quite a bit of research regarding “autism” in general which shows corresponding changes in cerebral activity. Will source this up (maybe, eventually, I definitely should though).
“Dorsal” autism types, some “ADHD” types, and some “schizophrenia” types are represented in the inverse of this, highly associative, delayed speech, a distinct lack of specificity. Things like “Hyperlexia” are artifacts of an overpowered dorsal stream.
Writing this, it occurs to me that the CA2 doesn’t directly handle “social” information at all, rather the global expectation management function of the CA2 is receiving imbalanced dorsal and ventral inputs causing specific types of deficit. For ventral types, the lack of ability to generalize out externally, and dorsal types the lack of ability to bind specificity internally.
The entire “internal” vs. “external” description I’ve been using is probably wrong if this construct is correct, it’s probably more accurately described as “general/dorsal vs. specific/ventral”. Huh.
This “General” vs. “Specific” stream feels scary consistent, it’s also “left brain/right brain” easy to digest as a concept.
I need to spend a couple of days attacking this construct.
Edit: Heh, Restless leg syndrome is a symptom of dorsal stream imbalance in the motor cortex. LOL, it’s actually full on “ADHD”/”autism”. Ugh, this is making too much sense, it’s scaring me.
Heh, I think I got the “internal/external” construct in the first place looking at the valence centers (e.g. Nucleus Accumbens). Thinking of the putamen as a difference calculator makes a lot of sense.
Edit 2: It occurs to me that “General” and “External” / “Specific” and “Internal” may be the same concepts. Looking at this through the “self/other” construct, “general” would refer to all things external to the individual (or local conspecifics), while “Internal” would be the specific individual itself. Animals can shift a slider between the two and change the dominant domain for information processing (likely via the valence centers).
I’m supposed to be attacking this concept right now but maybe it’s too fresh. Instead maybe I need to be thinking about how to craft experimental constructs to test it.