Sholto Douglas

You can think about the analogies here to the brain.

And in fact, I have one of our friends, though, he had a paper in grad school about thinking about attention in the brain.

And he said this is the only or first process.

like, neural explanation of why attention works, whereas we have evidence from why the CNN's work, convolutional neural networks work based on the visual cortex or something.

Yeah, I'm curious, do you think in the brain there's something like a residual stream of this compressed amount of information that's moving through and it's getting modified as you're thinking about something?

Even if that's not what's literally happening, do you think that's a good metaphor for what's happening in the brain?

also 70 of your neurons in the brain are in the cerebellum they're small um but they're they're there and they're taking up real metabolic cost this was one of glern's points that like what changed with humans was not just that we have more neurons or he says he shared this article um but specifically there's more neurons in the cerebral cortex in the cerebellum and

You should say more about this, but like they're more expensive and they're more involved in signaling and sending information back and forth.

Yeah.

Is that attention what's going on?

Yeah.

I want to zoom out and ask, I think what motivated this discussion in the beginning was we were talking about like, wait, what is the reasoning?

What is the memory?

What do you think about the analogy you found to attention and this?

Do you think of this as more just looking up the relevant memories or the relevant facts?

And if that is the case, like where is the reasoning happening in the brain?

How do we think about like how that builds up into the reasoning?

Yeah, one of the things I talked to Demis about was he had a paper in 2008 that memory and imagination are very linked because of this very thing that you mentioned of memory is reconstructive.

And so you are in some sense imagining every time you're thinking of a memory because you're only storing a condensed version of it and you have to.

And this is famously why human memory is terrible and why people in the witness box or whatever will just make shit up.