Dr Richard Wingate is a neuroscientist and lecturer at King’s college London. He is also Director of the Centre for Education within the Faculty of Life sciences and medicine and King’s and Editor-in-Chief of BrainFacts.org.His lab studies the cerebellum. For many years this bit of the brain has been known for its role in muscle movement. However, Richard explained that there is a lot we don’t know about the cerebellum, in fact it is a pretty mysterious part of the brain.
For example, one mystery is that if the cerebellum is disrupted during brain development, we don’t see problems with movement and motor control. Instead, we see conditions like Dyslexia or autism spectrum disorder.
‘If you didn’t have a Cerebellum, you could move your arms, but you couldn’t learn to play the piano.’
We now know the cerebellum has more roles than just movement control. It is very interesting because it is quite a simple part of the brain in terms of it not having many different cell types. However, it seems to be very involved in a lot of neurological processes. Richard explained that the cerebellum is like a small computer which a lot of different parts of the brain are connected to. It makes predictions and calculations. For example, if you go to pick up a pen, it calculates how to get your hand into the right place and grip with enough strength to pick it up.
Octopus brains
Octopus brains are very different to ours, yet they are extremely intelligent. (Have you heard about aquarium octopuses sneaking out of their tanks to steal fish and then covering their tracks?) Their brains are spread across their body, 2/3 in the arms and 1/3 wrapped around their oesophagus. What’s interesting is that new research shows they have structures similar to the cerebellum.
This is an example of convergent evolution - where the same biological structure has come about from two different evolutionary pathways. This suggests that the cerebellum must be doing some pretty important things if both humans and octopuses have evolvedto have one!
Legless lizards
For most land creatures, including lizards, the cerebellum is very structured. However, an exception to this is legless animals like the legless lizard, where the cerebellum is quite unstructured. As well as legless animals, most underwater creatures have an unstructured cerebellum. This includes tadpoles. But once the tadpole grows four legs, becomes a frog, and steps out onto land, this part of the brain reorganises and becomes structured. Richard points out that this is interesting because it shows that the brain and body development aren’t completely separate processes, they are connected. The development of the brain structure depends on the body structure and vice versa.
That’s all from me today, but if you want to find out more about that sneaky octopus click here.
Make sure to check out the next blog summing up the entire week!