Cognitive Signaling in Cerebellar Granule Cells

The cerebellum contains over three quarters of the neurons in the human brain (Herculano-Houzel, 2010), but it has traditionally been studied mainly in sensorimotor contexts. Yet in humans, cerebellar circuits activate during and are required for verbal and spatial processing tasks (eg, Stoodley et al (2012)), and multiple lines of evidence point to cerebellar links to psychoses such as schizophrenia as well as to autism (reviewed in Sokolov et al (2017)). Moreover, the cerebellum is widely connected with multiple cognitive regions of the neocortex (eg, Strick et al (2009)), with lateral cerebellar regions preferentially connected to frontal neocortical areas, both of which are expanded in the primate lineage. Despite this evidence, little is known about the putative cognitive signals that reach the cerebellum at the cellular physiological level