They find the center of quality control of the mind

They find the center of quality control of the mind


Located in the lower part of the brain, the cerebellum has been treated as a late occurrence by researchers studying superior brain functions, since until now it was thought that it was limited to controlling the movement

However, scientists from the School of Medicine at the University of Washington in St. Louis, United States, say that bypassing the cerebellum is an error because it intervenes in all aspects of higher brain functions, not only the movement, but also attention, thought, planning and decision-making, reports Europa Press.

"The biggest surprise to me was the discovery that 80 percent of the cerebellum is dedicated to smart things », says lead author Nico Dosenbach, assistant professor of Neurology, Occupational Therapy and Pediatrics. "Everyone thought that the cerebellum focused on movement. If your cerebellum is damaged, you can not move smoothly; Your hand trembles when you try to reach something. Our research suggests that the cerebellum serves as a quality control of the movement and that it also checks your thoughts, calming them down, correcting them, perfecting things. "

Dosenbach is a founding member of the 'Midnight Scan Club', a group of neuroscientists at the University of Washington who took turns on a late-night magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, Scanning your own brains for hours to generate a lot of high quality data for your research. A previous analysis of the data from 'Midnight Scan Club' showed that a type of brain scanner called functional MRI connectivity can reliably detect fundamental differences in the way individual brains are connected.

The postdoctoral researcher and first author Scott Marek, decided to apply a similar analysis to the cerebellum. In the best known cerebral cortex, the wrinkled outer layer of the brain, wiring maps have been drawn connecting distant areas in networks that govern vision, attention, language and movement. But nobody knew how the cerebellum is organized in individuals, in part because a peculiarity of MRI technology means that the data obtained from the lower part of the brain tend to be of low quality. However, in the data set of the Midnight Exploration Club, Marek had access to more than ten hours of exploration in each of the ten people, enough to seriously observe the cerebellum.

Using bark networks as a template, Marek could identify the networks in the cerebellum. In particular, sensory networks (vision, hearing and touch) are missing and only 20 percent of the cerebellum is dedicated to movement, approximately the same amount as in the cerebral cortex. The remaining 80 percent is occupied by networks involved in higher order cognition: the care network; the default network, which has to do with daydreaming, remembering memories and just thinking idly; and two networks that supervise executive functions, such as decision making and planning.

"The networks of executive functions are overrepresented in the cerebellum," says Marek. All our understanding of the cerebellum must move away from being involved in motor control and thinking that it is more involved in the general control of higher level cognition. " The researchers, whose work is published on Thursday in 'Neuron', They measured the time of brain activity and found that the cerebellum was the last step in neurological circuits.

The signals were received through sensory systems and processed in intermediate networks in the cerebral cortex before being sent to the cerebellum. There, according to the authors, the signals undergo final quality controls before they are sent back to the cerebral cortex for implementation. "If you think of an assembly line, the cerebellum is the person who ultimately inspects the car and says, 'This is good; we will sell it 'or' it has a dent; we have to go back and repair it '- says Dosenbach as an example -. It is where all your thoughts and actions are refined and the quality is controlled ».

It's known that people with damage to the cerebellum are uncoordinated, They have an unsteady gait, confused speech and difficulty doing fine motor tasks, such as eating. The cerebellum is also quite sensitive to alcohol, which is one of the reasons why people who have taken too many drinks stumble, but the new data may help explain why someone who is drunk also shows poor judgment. Just as a person staggers drunk because his compromised cerebellum is unable to perform the usual quality controls on motor function, poor decisions fueled by alcohol may also reflect a breakdown of quality control over executive functions.

Marek also performed individualized network analyzes on the ten people in the data set and found that, although brain functions are organized in roughly the same pattern in the cerebellum of all, there is enough individual variation to distinguish brain scans performed in either of two participants. Scientists are now investigating whether those individual differences in cerebellar networks correlate with intelligence, behavior, personality traits such as adaptability or psychiatric disorders. EP

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