Cerebellum size while the cerebrum decreased in size With both the development and implementation of motor tasks, visual-spatial skills and learning taking place in the cerebellum, the growth of the cerebellum is thought to have some form of correlation to greater human cognitive abilities. The lateral hemispheres of the cerebellum are now 2.7 times greater in both humans and apes than they are in monkeys. These changes in the cerebellum size cannot be explained by greater muscle mass. They show that either the development of the cerebellum is tightly linked to that of the rest of the brain or that neural
Anatomy of the cerebellum uniform, with connections organized into a rough, three-dimensional array of perpendicular circuit elements. This organizational uniformity makes the nerve circuitry relatively easy to study. To envision this "perpendicular array", one might imagine a tree-lined street with wires running straight through the branches of one tree to the next. There are three layers to the cerebellar cortex; from outer to inner layer, these are the molecular, Purkinje, and granular layers. The function of the cerebellar cortex is essentially to modulate information flowing through the deep nuclei. The microcircuitry of the cerebellum is schematized in Figure 5. Mossy and climbing fibers carry