I think the circuitry which monitors salt homeostasis, and which sends a reward signalwhen both salt is deficient and the neocortex starts imagining the taste of salt … I think that circuitry is innate and in the genome. I don’t think it’s learned.
That’s just a guess from first principles: there’s no reason it couldn’t be innate, it’s not that complicated, and it’s very important to get the behavior right. (Trial-and-error learning of salt homeostasis would, I imagine, be often fatal.)
I do think there are some non-neocortex aspects of food-related behavior that are learned—I’m thinking especially of how, if you eat food X, then get sick a few hours later, you develop a revulsion to the taste of food X. That’s obviously learned, and I really don’t think that this learning is happening in the neocortex. It’s too specific. It’s only one specific type of association, it has to occur in a specific time-window, etc.
But I suspect that the subcortical systems governing salt homeostasis in particular are entirely innate (or at least mostly innate), i.e. not involving learning.
Does that answer your question? Sorry if I’m misunderstanding.
This all sounds reasonable. I just saw that you were arguing for more being learned at runtime (as some sort of Steven Reknip), and I thought that surely not all the salt machinery can be learnt, and I wanted to see which of those expectations would win.
I think the circuitry which monitors salt homeostasis, and which sends a reward signal when both salt is deficient and the neocortex starts imagining the taste of salt … I think that circuitry is innate and in the genome. I don’t think it’s learned.
That’s just a guess from first principles: there’s no reason it couldn’t be innate, it’s not that complicated, and it’s very important to get the behavior right. (Trial-and-error learning of salt homeostasis would, I imagine, be often fatal.)
I do think there are some non-neocortex aspects of food-related behavior that are learned—I’m thinking especially of how, if you eat food X, then get sick a few hours later, you develop a revulsion to the taste of food X. That’s obviously learned, and I really don’t think that this learning is happening in the neocortex. It’s too specific. It’s only one specific type of association, it has to occur in a specific time-window, etc.
But I suspect that the subcortical systems governing salt homeostasis in particular are entirely innate (or at least mostly innate), i.e. not involving learning.
Does that answer your question? Sorry if I’m misunderstanding.
This all sounds reasonable. I just saw that you were arguing for more being learned at runtime (as some sort of Steven Reknip), and I thought that surely not all the salt machinery can be learnt, and I wanted to see which of those expectations would win.
(Oh, I get it, Reknip is Pinker backwards.) If you’re interested in my take more generally see My Computational Framework for the Brain. :-)