Tuesday, 18 August 2020
How labelling brain parts functionally can be overly simplistic: the cerebellum as a case in point
Today I’d like to talk about the cerebellum. To introduce this topic, I’ll remind you that as animals’ bodies evolved and became more complex, they were subjected to greater adaptive pressures to move more and more efficiently, and the cerebellum is a brain structure that was closely involved in this process.
Here’s the most surprising fact about the cerebellum. The human brain as a whole contains about 86 billion neurons. The cerebral cortex accounts contains about 16 billion of these neurons and accounts for about 80% of the brain’s weight. In contrast, the cerebellum accounts for only about 10% of the brain’s weight, but contains nearly 69 billion neurons! Thus more than three-quarters of the neurons in the human brain are located in the cerebellum, even though it is a small structure compared with the brain as a whole. (more…)
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Wednesday, 7 September 2016
Motor cortex is required for learning but not for executing a motor skill
The motor cortex was long thought to be the part of the brain that controlled the body’s voluntary movements. Given the plasticity of the cortex as a whole, it seemed reasonable to believe that decisive changes in the connectivity of the neurons in the motor cortex might well be associated with motor learning. Although this may indeed be the case, a study published by Risa Kawai and colleagues in the journal Neuron in May 2015 forces us to reconsider the primacy of the motor cortex in learned sequences of movements, at least in rats. (more…)
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