What is the Cerebellum?
The cerebellum, Latin for “little brain”, is a plum-sized portion of the brain located below the cerebral hemispheres and behind the brain stem. The cerebellum’s main claim to fame is that it contains half the neurons of the brain despite being only 10% of its size. This is because its main constituents are tiny granule cells. The primary acknowledged function of the cerebellum is to provide feedback and fine-tuning for motor output. It is also associated with the sense of proprioception, which provides us with an intuitive map of the location of our body parts. Without proprioception, it would be impossible to remain balanced while walking in the dark — we wouldn’t have an intuitive sense of where our legs were located. Like many other parts of the brain, the cerebellum was originally associated with a single function, but with the advent of PET (positron emission tomography), fMRI, and other neural imaging techniques, it has been discovered that the cerebellum is activated in tasks
