![]() ![]() In fact, hints that damage to the cerebellum might lead to nonmotor consequences had emerged as early as the 1800s. In 1986, before this fact was established, Leiner and her colleagues published a paper proposing that the most recently evolved parts of the cerebellum contributed to higher-level mental functions, thus enabling “mental dexterity” in addition to the “motor dexterity” the “little brain” was already known for. The surface area of the human cerebellum, with its tightly wound folds, is a whopping 80 percent of that of the cerebral cortex. “The cerebellum has a much richer and more interesting role in driving behavior.” Beyond movementįor Henrietta Leiner, a neuroscientist working in the 1980s and initially trained in mathematics, physics, and computer science, it was the cerebellum’s large size in humans compared with other animals that made her question whether its role was exclusively confined to motor functions. “This view that the cerebellum is only involved in motor behaviors is incorrect,” says Hausser. In recent years, scientists not only have continued to uncover new roles for the cerebellum but have begun to map the circuits that mediate the brain region’s nonmotor roles. This work has also pointed to the potential importance of the cerebellum in a range of neuropsychiatric disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia. Evidence has steadily been building for the role of the cerebellum in a broad spectrum of functions, including cognition, emotional processing, and social behavior. Starting with a handful of cases in which patients with cerebellar damage exhibited nonmotor defects, such as difficulties using cues to plan their actions, this once-radical hypothesis has gained ample support from research over the past several decades in both human patients and animals. But now, he adds, “we need to rewrite the textbooks.”īeginning around the 1980s, scientists began to wonder whether the cerebellum’s roles might extend beyond its motor-related reputation. “For the past 100 years, that’s been kind of a textbook view of what the cerebellum is good for,” says Michael Hausser, a neuroscientist at University College London in the UK. He, like Holmes, noted that the cerebellum was the seat of motor coordination in the brain. In the early 1800s, French physiologist Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens removed the cerebellums from pigeons and observed the animals stumbling around as if intoxicated. Holmes’s reports corroborated what other scientists had documented nearly a century earlier.
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