[hmsimha]

> It's interesting to note that you don't need a cerebellum to move or think, but the loss of it impairs both. Contrast this to damage to your motor cortex which can result in paralysis.

This strikes me as akin to saying that you don't need a GPU to perform graphical processing, but not having it impairs your graphical processing capability. The brain wires itself throughout a human's development to take advantage of the specialization of its components and their parallelism.

Damaging an adult's cerebellum once those connections are in place would be the equivalent of removing a GPU before trying to play a game that has been developed to rely on it.

At least that's my simplified analogy drawn from my admittedly imperfect understanding of how the human brain and computers work.

[Jweb_Guru]

Trying to reason about the brain like it's a computer is a very common thing for computer scientists to do. Unfortunately, it's also mostly fallacious (since for a whole host of reasons, neurons don't work like integrated circuits), and simplistic analogies like cerebellum = GPU are probably not going to give much insight into what's really going on. I'm not saying "the brain is beyond human comprehension" or anything silly like that, just that you have to approach it from a biochemical context.

[quotemstr]

Sure, but the brain is a Turing machine, albeit with hardware acceleration of key functions (e.g., edge detection in the visual cortex). Mathematics, not chemistry, structures the problems it solves, if not the algorithms and heuristics involved. It's utterly fascinating to see how nature tackles the same problems that we solve independently using completely different tools.

[collyw]

I don't think anyone is anywhere close to "understanding perfectly how the brain works".