Hm, I had a vague memory that contrast detection relies on something like lateral inhibition but when I thought about it a bit more it doesn’t really make sense and I guess I conflated it with edge detection in the retina.
Regarding cerebellum in hearing voices: If I understand your model correctly, it goes something like this. Region S (sender) “generates voices” and region R (receiver) “hears voices” generated by S. R expects to receive those signals from S (or maybe even just expects to receive these kinds of signals in general, without specifying where they come from). R gets surprised when it receives unexpected signals and interprets them as “not mine”. R would expect to receive them, if it first got a message “hey, S is soon going to send some voice-signals to you”. Isn’t this exactly the role of the cerebellum, to learn that, e.g. if S activates in this particular way (about to “generate voices”), then R will soon activate in the other way (“hears voices”) and therefore it would make sense to preempt R, so that it can expect to get that particular signal from S and act accordingly even before receiving that signal?
(1A) there’s a message from S to Motor Area M that says to produce voices;
(1B) there’s a message from S to R that updates R on what S is doing (and in particular, it tells (R) that (1A) is happening right now);
(2) Motor Area M “does voices” (I’m hazy on the details), and some sensory consequence of those voices make their way back to R.
So then the auditory hallucination in my model would be if (1A) and (2) happen, but (1B) doesn’t happen.
Generally, I don’t think this story is very sensitive to timing. I think the nature of a hallucinated voice is that it feels exogenous not just for a tiny fraction of a second between the (2) signal and the (1B) signal arriving at R, but rather it continues to feel exogenous for many seconds.
Hm, I had a vague memory that contrast detection relies on something like lateral inhibition but when I thought about it a bit more it doesn’t really make sense and I guess I conflated it with edge detection in the retina.
Regarding cerebellum in hearing voices: If I understand your model correctly, it goes something like this. Region S (sender) “generates voices” and region R (receiver) “hears voices” generated by S. R expects to receive those signals from S (or maybe even just expects to receive these kinds of signals in general, without specifying where they come from). R gets surprised when it receives unexpected signals and interprets them as “not mine”. R would expect to receive them, if it first got a message “hey, S is soon going to send some voice-signals to you”. Isn’t this exactly the role of the cerebellum, to learn that, e.g. if S activates in this particular way (about to “generate voices”), then R will soon activate in the other way (“hears voices”) and therefore it would make sense to preempt R, so that it can expect to get that particular signal from S and act accordingly even before receiving that signal?
The model would be:
(1A) there’s a message from S to Motor Area M that says to produce voices;
(1B) there’s a message from S to R that updates R on what S is doing (and in particular, it tells (R) that (1A) is happening right now);
(2) Motor Area M “does voices” (I’m hazy on the details), and some sensory consequence of those voices make their way back to R.
So then the auditory hallucination in my model would be if (1A) and (2) happen, but (1B) doesn’t happen.
Generally, I don’t think this story is very sensitive to timing. I think the nature of a hallucinated voice is that it feels exogenous not just for a tiny fraction of a second between the (2) signal and the (1B) signal arriving at R, but rather it continues to feel exogenous for many seconds.