Thank you for pointing to the basal ganglia’s relation to motor control! This feels like one of those things that’s obvious but I just didn’t know because I haven’t “broadly studied” neuroanatomy. Relatedly, if anyone knows of any resources of neuroanatomy that really dig into why we think of this or that region of the brain as being different, I’d love to hear. I know there’s both a lot of “this area defs has this structure and does this thing” and “an fMRI went beep so this is the complain-about-ants part of your brain!”, and I don’t yet have the knowledge to tell them apart.
Also:
Connecting this with the GNW, several of the salience cues used in the model are perceptual signals, e.g. whether or not a wall or a cylinder is currently perceived. We also know that signals which get to the GNW have a massively boosted signal strength over ones that do not. So while the GNW does not “command” any particular subsystem to take action, salience cues that get into the GNW can get a significant boost, helping them win the action selection process.
This was a very helpful emphasis shift for me. Even though I wasn’t conceptualizing GNW as a commander, I was still thinking of it as a “destination”, probably because of all the claims about its connection to consciousness. The “signal boosting” frame feels like a much better fit. Subsystems are already plugged into the various parts of your brain that they need to be connected to; the GNW is not a universal router. It’s only when you’re doing Virtual Machine esque conscious thinking that it’s a routing bottleneck. Other times it might look like a bottle neck, but maybe it’s more “if you get a signal boost from the GNW, you’re probs gonna win, and only one thing can get boosted at a time”.
Thank you for pointing to the basal ganglia’s relation to motor control! This feels like one of those things that’s obvious but I just didn’t know because I haven’t “broadly studied” neuroanatomy. Relatedly, if anyone knows of any resources of neuroanatomy that really dig into why we think of this or that region of the brain as being different, I’d love to hear. I know there’s both a lot of “this area defs has this structure and does this thing” and “an fMRI went beep so this is the complain-about-ants part of your brain!”, and I don’t yet have the knowledge to tell them apart.
Also:
This was a very helpful emphasis shift for me. Even though I wasn’t conceptualizing GNW as a commander, I was still thinking of it as a “destination”, probably because of all the claims about its connection to consciousness. The “signal boosting” frame feels like a much better fit. Subsystems are already plugged into the various parts of your brain that they need to be connected to; the GNW is not a universal router. It’s only when you’re doing Virtual Machine esque conscious thinking that it’s a routing bottleneck. Other times it might look like a bottle neck, but maybe it’s more “if you get a signal boost from the GNW, you’re probs gonna win, and only one thing can get boosted at a time”.