Monday, March 13, 2006

What Does the Cerebellum Do?

The cerebellum automates motor tasks. It learns the temporal relationships between sensory and motor signals. After much practice, motor tasks get transferred to the cerebellum. In other words, well-learned tasks get chunked together as motor programs in the cerebellum. More specifically, these are probably closed-loop policies/options, as defined in the reinforcement learning literature. This whole process frees other areas (in the cerebral cortex) to focus its attention on new tasks, building upon the automatic skills stored in the cerebellum. It enables agents to learn hierarchies of motor skills.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

yeah, well i dont understand this

its not explaining CLEARLY...!

Anonymous said...

Im a kid how the hell am i supposed to understand this.

Tyler Streeter said...

Gina-

Who ever said kids are supposed to understand this? :) I am writing this as a record of my research progress, not necessarily as a publication for the general public.

That being said... here's a simpler explanation. Whenever you learn a new motor skill (like playing the piano, throwing a football, or ballet dancing), it takes a lot of concentration at first. You have to make conscious decisions about every single muscle movement. This takes a lot of mental resources. However, the cerebellum is "watching" the whole time; it watches the rest of the brain (including sensory and motor areas) and learns which actions to perform in each situation.

After a lot of training, you don't have to make all those decisions anymore because the cerebellum has taken them over. Fortunately, the cerebellum is huge (it uses half of the neurons in the brain), so we can learn tons of different motor skills. People with cerebellar damage lose this benefit, so they constantly have to make decisions about which muscles to move next, even for very simple tasks like walking.

Anonymous said...

these dummy betta stay their azz in school its easy dumm azzs

alinda giles said...

my friend had stroke under heart bypass and damage to the cerebellum. he can hardly talk. cannot walk as yet and this happened 3 weeks ago. it is a long way home.

Tyler Streeter said...

Alinda-

I'm very sorry to hear about your friend. I don't want to appear to understand the medical side of things... most of my work deals with theoretical models of brain function. That being said, even if the damaged area does not return to normal, other brain areas can "take over" the functions of the damaged area. For example, although the cerebellum area that handles walking may be damaged, over time it may be possible to learn to walk with direct conscious effort (continually thinking about each step), which would be mentally exhausting but better than not walking at all.

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much Tyler Streeter! That really helped me with my homework! I understood it the way you put it! Thanx

alinda said...

dear tyler streeter,
he can walk, talk but cannot do any business. his mind is not clear. will he ever be business mind active again.

Unknown said...

I think it is very funny how some of the people who posted comments can't even type a sentence without typos. Come on, people. You disappoint me.

Unknown said...

Well the cerebellum have multiply duty of the motor control and is in charge of the attention and language, so the cerebellum is pretty important as you can see.
and also there is a medication how can fool the cerebellum and stimulate it and is the generic viagra this pill can pum more blood from the heart with no objection from the brain .

jessie said...

dear tyler streeter,

thank you so much for telling me, but i have to do a project and make up a brain out of clay, so what would the size of a cerebellum be for a smart anti social animals that live under water? please reply and help me so i do not fail. and i cannot do the clay brain with out more info. please help me.

jessie said...
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