Re:When we take turns speaking, we chime in after a cultural...
by derefr on Monday January 25, 2016 @12:34PM
(#10968520)
Beyond this, it's doubly unsurprising when you remember that the brain isn't anything like a context-switching CPU, but much more like a bunch of discrete DSP circuits. Much like computers can offload video decoding to a dedicated DSP "pipeline" that will continue performing each step without being coordinated by the CPU, language processing and construction—word-lookup, grammar, etc.—are steps in an offloaded "pipeline" of brain areas.
Though, highlighting a specific sentence of your quote, the analogous operation becomes quite clear:
> We continuously predict what the rest of a sentence will contain[...]
Speculative execution via branch prediction!
(The important thing to highlight with that analogy, though, is that the brain has multiple "branch predictors." In fact, one could think of speculative execution as an inherent low-level feature of each node in a recurrent neural network. This isn't our executive function "predicting the future" generally; this is each part of the brain going on with its work independently by making assumptions that its speculative work isn't going to go to waste.)
Though, highlighting a specific sentence of your quote, the analogous operation becomes quite clear:
> We continuously predict what the rest of a sentence will contain[...]
Speculative execution via branch prediction!
(The important thing to highlight with that analogy, though, is that the brain has multiple "branch predictors." In fact, one could think of speculative execution as an inherent low-level feature of each node in a recurrent neural network. This isn't our executive function "predicting the future" generally; this is each part of the brain going on with its work independently by making assumptions that its speculative work isn't going to go to waste.)