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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] In a study that appeared last week (October 25) in Neuron, Dosenbach and his colleagues report what those late-night data reveal about the cerebellum, a region nestled underneath the cerebral cortex at the back of the skull. Their results suggest the anatomy of this region is highly individual, and that it is involved in not only coordinating and smoothing out physical movement—its most famous function—but in running quality control of our thoughts.

[...] And in the Midnight Scan Club data, activity in cortical areas associated with those higher cognitive functions was soon followed by activity in connected regions of the cerebellum, revealing integrated networks between the two, the authors say. "The regions that are involved in these executive functions . . . in the cerebellum, they temporally lag behind the cortex by several hundred milliseconds," says Scott Marek, a postdoc in Dosenbach's lab and first author on the study. He thinks nascent thoughts are relayed from the cortex to the cerebellum, which "has some sort of internal model about how the world should be, and if [the signals are] correct, great, the output goes out, but if not, then those signals get relayed back to the cerebral cortex to adjust the output."

In essence, the cerebellum appears to be performing quality control over our thinking—something it's already known to do for motor functions. Fiez says other neuroscientists had suspected it does so in higher cognitive functions, and she agrees with Marek that the new results are evidence for that hypothesis.

-- submitted from IRC

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