Does the Cerebellum Balance Opposing Brain Systems?
www.brainexplorer.org As it becomes increasingly clear that brain systems that must be kept in balanced relationships are responsible for the realities that we experience and the emotions that we attach to them a good question becomes “what does the balancing?” The cerebellum is becoming the prime candidate. Remember that the cerebellum, along with our frontal lobes and hippocampus, is much larger in humans than our physical stature would predict. In fact this mysterious structure contains over half of the brain’s neurons. The commonly recognized function of the cerebellum is the coordination and balance of muscle movements. Our talents in that area certainly would not explain the need for such enlarged cerebellums. To understand this we need to revisit the idea that our frontal lobes are essentially an outgrowth of our motor systems. Humans must balance all of those symbol-moving capacities in addition to the muscle movements that the cerebellum is more commonly associated with. The r
