Grey Power

At the back of your skull, about level with your ears, sits your cerebellum. It's only the size of a Mars bar, but it contains more neurons than the rest of your brain combined. For a long time, scientists thought the cerebellum was primitive, only controlling how the body moves, but recent work has shown it's more complex. Here, we see a slice of a mouse cerebellum highlighting nuclei neurons (black) important for motor control. Researchers showed that if these cells can't signal, mice develop severe movement problems. However, the brain compensates for this damage, so adult mice show few symptoms. In contrast, neurons in the cerebellar cortex seem to control social behaviours instead of movement, and the brain can't compensate for their damage. These results reveal the surprising complexity of the cerebellum and help us better understand how the brain copes with damage before birth.

Written by Henry Stennett

Henry Stennett

Writer

Henry is a science communicator at Cancer Research UK and a freelance writer. He used to research microbiology but now he’s got the writing bug.

• Image from work by Meike E. van der Heijden, Alejandro G. Rey Hipolito, et al contributed by Meike E. van der Heijden
• Department of Pathology & Immunology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA
• Image copyright held by Meike E. van der Heijden
• Research published in Nature Communications, May 2023