The Wiring in Your Head

One theory, said Ivry, is that the region is predicting what’s going to happen in the very near future based on a lifetime of tracking what has worked and what hasn’t in the past and adjusting its movements accordingly. The cerebellum, said Ivry, is a “giant pattern recognition system” containing, perhaps, all the peculiar codes of the cradle. “In a sense you could say it is capable of basically storing all possible patterns we’ve ever experienced,” said Ivry.

In what is either a coincidence or a remarkable sufficiency condition for language learning, the parallelized structure of the cerebellum — which Ivry described as “the exact same processing unit repeated billions and billions of times” — is analogous to that of the massively parallel hardware the language robot was trained on, called a graphics processing unit, or GPU. (The Canadian neuroscientist and computer scientist Jörn Diedrichsen sees similarity in their evolution, as well: “The GPU is a kind of special purpose circuit designed to very quickly do a specific type of computation. And now the GPU is being reused in many ways that the original inventor didn’t anticipate.”) I, Language Robot

I find this idea fascinating, not only the implications of an analog between the structures of our brains and computer hardware, but also the idea that the cerebellum acts as a pattern processor, absorbing patterns through our lifetime, and when we go to write, we access those written patterns. It feels to us like we are creating a new pattern each time, the work of writing, trying to string the words along, when in fact we’re fishing through a series of possibilities, trying to find the word that fits next.