Author: Laura Sanders / Source: Science News
Its name means “little brain” in Latin, but the cerebellum is anything but.
The fist-sized orb at the back of the brain has an outsized role in social interactions, a study in mice suggests.Once thought to be a relatively simple brain structure that had only one job, coordinating movement, the cerebellum is gaining recognition for being an important mover and shaker in the brain.
Early clinical observations of people with movement disorders pigeonholed the cerebellum, says neuroscientist Kamran Khodakhah of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. But the “cerebellum has more than half of the neurons in your entire brain,” he says. “It never made sense that the only thing it confines itself to do is motor coordination.”
Khodakhah’s new results on social behavior, described in the Jan. 18 Science, expand that view, and add to other work on the cerebellum’s role in memory, language and emotions. The results also offer clues to disorders such as autism and schizophrenia, both of which have been linked to an abnormal cerebellum.
By finding a connection between the cerebellum and a part of the brain involved in social behavior, Khodakhah and his colleagues “solve an important gap in our understanding of the circuitry underlying disorders such as autism and schizophrenia,” says pediatric neurologist and developmental biologist Mustafa Sahin of Boston Children’s Hospital. “We’ve known for a while that the cerebellum is involved in these disorders, but we really haven’t been able to connect it to other regions directly.”
Khodakhah and his colleagues went looking for connections to…
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