The cerebellum has been classically considered as the subcortical center for motor control. How- ever, accumulating experimental evidence has revealed that it also plays an important role in cognition, for instance, in learning and memory, as well as in emotional behavior and nonsomatic activities, such as visceral and immunological responses

I. Gritti

Ivana Gritti

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Natural Science

The cerebellum, the hypothalamus and behavior

AIR Universita degli studi di Milano

Vol.5, No.7, 832-834 (2013)                                                                   Natural Science 
doi:10.4236/ns.2013.57100 
The cerebellum, the hypothalamus and behavior 
Ivana Gritti 
 
Department Clinical Science-Luigi Sacco, School of Medicine and Surgery, University of Milan, Milano, Italy;  
Ivana.Grittti@unimi.it 
 
Received 29 April 2013; revised 1 June 2013; accepted 8 June 2013 
 
Copyright © 2013 Ivana Gritti. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which 
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 
ABSTRACT 
The cerebellum has been classically considered 
as the subcortical center for motor control. How- 
ever, accumulating experimental evidence has 
revealed that it also plays an important role in 
cognition, for instance, in learning and memory, 
as well as in emotional behavior and nonsomatic 
activities, such as visceral and immunological 
responses. 
 
Keywords: Cerebellum; Hypothalamus; Behavior; 
Memory; Plasticity; Learning; Repair 
1. INTRODUCTION 
At the back of our skull, perched upon the brain stem 
under the overarching mantle of the great hemispheres of 
the cerebrum, rests a baseball-sized, bean-shaped lump 
of gray and white brain tissue. This is the cerebellum. 
The cerebellum discloses an intense, highly distinctive 
activity to the sensitive instruments and manipulations of 
modern brain physiology. Its signals have begun to tell us 
that, though seemingly having no direct control over 
body functions, it monitors and coordinates the brain’s 
other centers, mediating between them and the body. For 
Medieval anatomists, the cerebellar cortex was the arbor 
vitae, the purported seat of the soul. 
Through its connections with the brain’s motor centers 
the cerebellum receives impulses similar to those sent 
out to the muscles, as well as from the end organs of the 
peripheral nervous system, the so-called proprioceptive 
endings, in the contracting muscles. The cerebellum com- 
pares these two sets of impulses and transmits modified 
impulses back to the motor centers in the brain and, in- 
directly, out to the muscles. This checking of response 
against command and fine-tuning of command to re- 
sponse smoothes and coordinates muscle action. When 
the action involves two opposing sets of muscles, the  
cerebellum integrates the data for both, coordinating con- 
traction of the flexor muscles at the front of the arm with 
relaxation of the extensor muscle at the back. This func- 
tion of the cerebellum was recognized as early as 1898 
by the great British physiologist Charles Sherrington, 
who called it the head ganglion of the proprioceptive 
system. 
Further investigation demonstrates that the cerebellum 
plays a similar role in maintaining the body’s equilibrium; 
in this instance, the initial impulses arise in the semicir- 
cular canals of the inner ear. The cerebellum integrates 
these signals with the proprioceptive data coming from 
the opposing group of muscles that maintain body pos- 
ture. As the product of this integration, the impulses are 
sent out to both the lower and higher nervous centers 
directing the intricate performance of the many muscles 
in action even when the body is merely standing still. 
The cerebellum was thus established as a center govern- 
ing the musculature by coordinating directed action both 
consciously and unconsciously. 
As in the cerebrum, the various functions of the cere- 
bellum are localized in distinctly defined areas of its 
cortex. These areas have been mapped by detecting and 
plotting cortical electrical activity. Control of the body’s 
equilibrium, for example, is localized in the extreme 
front and rear surfaces of the cerebellum. The proprio- 
ceptive areas appear as actual maps of the body on the 
cortex: two distorted “homuncoli”, one face-on and the 
other in double profile back-to back. It was long thought 
that plotting of these areas had completed the map of the 
cerebellar cortex, in keeping with the notion that the 
cerebellum’s activity was restricted to maintaining the 
body’s equilibrium and posture and coordinating muscle 
movements. It was only later found that the cerebellum 
was equally involved in coordinating the sensations of 
touch, hearing and vision. The prevailing theory at pre- 
sent is that the cerebellar circuitry is a control system 
imposed upon the basic ascending (sensory) and descen- 
ding (motor) circuits of the nervous system [1-3]. 
Copyright © 2013 SciRes.                                    Openly accessible at http://www.scirp.org/journal/ns/ 
I. Gritti / Natural Science 5 (2013) 832-834 833
2. OSCILLATORY ACTIVITY OF THE 
CEREBELLUM 
The system works by generating electrical waves at 
the highest frequency in the nervous system, imposing its 
peculiar high frequency, low-amplitude characteristics 
upon all impulses that pass through it, often smothering 
the frequency amplitude characteristics of impulses origin- 
nating elsewhere in the nervous system (for a review see 
[4]). 
3. THE CEREBELLAR-HYPOTHALAMIC 
CIRCUITS 
There is sizable evidence documenting that integration 
is one of the major functions of the cerebellum and that it 
is involved in still more diverse aspects of the nervous 
system. For example, cerebellar influences on visceral 
functions have been described (for a review see [5]). The 
cerebellum, via its connection with the hypothalamus, is 
involved in controlling vasomotor reflexes and blood 
pressure wave, carotid sinus reflexes, and the somatic 
and autonomic manifestations of shame rage, pupil nicti- 
tating membrane, respiration, gastrointestinal functions 
(for a review see [5]). The reciprocal cerebellar hypotha- 
lamic pathway has been suggested to provide circuits 
through which autonomic hypothalamic processes may 
be influenced by the cerebellum [5-7]. The cerebellar 
connections into the rostral basal forebrain substantiate 
its role in emotional expression and behavior [8] (for a 
review see [5]). 
The central circadian clock of the mammalian brain 
resides in the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothala- 
mus. At the molecular level, the circadian clockwork of 
the suprachiasmatic nucleus constitutes a self-sustained 
autoregulatory feedback mechanism reflected by the rhy- 
thmic expression of clock genes. A recent discovery is 
the circadian oscillations of molecular clock components 
in the cerebellar cortex, some of which are regulated by 
the suprachiasmatic molecular clock [9]. 
Somatic-nonsomatic integration is critical for the gen- 
eration and execution of appropriate and coordinated 
behavioral response to changes in internal and external 
environments. Intriguingly, the central histaminergic and 
orexinergic systems originating from the hypothalamus, 
a high autonomic regulatory center, innervate almost the 
entire brain including the cerebellum. Furthermore, it has 
been suggested that the hypothalamic histaminergic and 
orexinergic systems bridging the nonsomatic center to 
somatic motor structures may actively modulate cerebel- 
lar neurons and subsequently participate in motor control 
and somatic-nonsomatic integration [10]. Cerebellar fas- 
tigial glutamatergic neurons participate in modulating 
humoral immunity, and this effect is mediated by the 
hypothalamus via fastigial-hypothalamic glutamatergic 
transmission [11]. 
4. CEREBELLUM AND NON-MOTOR 
FUNCTIONS AND  
NEUROPSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS 
Cerebellar dysfunction is not only manifested as ataxia, 
a common symptom of various neurological disorders. 
There is now considerable evidence for a link between 
the cerebellum and non-motor functions and neuropsy- 
chiatric disorders, including dyslexia, autism, and atten- 
tion deficit hyperactivity disorder. In addition, cerebellar 
pathologies have been correlated with various emotional 
disorders such as depression [12]. The cerebellum is 
known to play a role in motor learning, like adaptation of 
the vestibulo-ocular reflex and eye-blink conditioning, 
through long-term depression of synapses between par- 
allel fibers and Purkinje cells. The cerebellar vermis is 
involved in the retention of fear memory consolidation 
[13,14] (for a review see [5]). Owing to its myriad func- 
tions of integration and coordination, the cerebellum pro- 
vides a suitable model to study neuronal plasticity, learn- 
ing, and repair [2,15-20]. 
5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
Thanks are given to K. Britsch for reading the manuscript. 
 
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