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This condition is known as cerebellar agenesis. A review of many of the case studies was done by a prominent cerebellum researcher [1]. Typically the individual
by blennon 12y ago
This condition is known as cerebellar agenesis. A review of many of the case studies was done by a prominent cerebellum researcher [1]. Typically the individuals that survive past birth live relatively normal lives but with impaired motor skills which are slower to develop. Their abilities are remarkable given that acute lesions to the cerebellum result in much more significant impairments (e.g. not being able to touch your nose with the tip of your finger in one smooth, coordinated movement).
These individuals probably also exhibit diminished cognitive function as well. Only recently has it been recognized that the cerebellum is also involved in cognition [2]. It's interesting to note that you don't need a cerebellum to move or think, but the loss of it impairs both. Contrast this to damage to your motor cortex which can result in paralysis.
[1] Glickstein, M (1994). Cerebellar Agenesis. Brain, 117, 1209-1212.
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23996631 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23996631
- cordite 12y agoWhat fills up that space? Liquid? Scar tissue?
- jccooper 12y agoCerebrospinal fluid in this case and most; it's the general purpose volume-filler of the central nervous system.
- skj 12y ago> This condition is known as cerebellar agenesis. To tease you a little bit, I read this as > This condition is known as being born without a cerebellum. I don't know why we need a latin name for everything!
- ntumlin 12y agoIf I had to guess, I'd say it's because it's slightly faster, still makes sense if you have learned the right bits of Latin, and because it makes you feel smart.
- lifeisstillgood 12y agoMore usefully it means doctors fluent in different languages have a very good chance of accurately describing conditions to each other.
- wlesieutre 12y agoIt certainly makes it easier to find in a book or via search. You have one word for what it's called, instead of having some under "Born without a cerebellum," some as "Missing cerebellum," others in "No cerebellum," "Undeveloped cerebellum," etc. Plus it's more convenient to say. Not a big deal for us, but to people who deal with crazy medical conditions all day long, describing each one in natural language would be imprecise and time consuming.
- geoelectric 12y agoThough obviously it's not the reason it was adopted, it is kind of neat that using a dead language for scientific terms disambiguates them cleanly for the purposes of searching. Any live language would have accidental matches (even quoted) where it's just the obvious thing to say, a la "born without a cerebellum".
- beambot 12y agoTo expand on that... it also solves the problem of technical terms evolving new nomenclature (or new meanings for old nomenclature!) over time.
- jkdsfhkssfhjk 12y agonot a dead language.. greek language is still alive and indeed it sounds like "born without a cerebellum" (but to be fair the syntax reminds of medical term)
- zarriak 12y agoLatin is a dead language, there has not been a native speaker for a very long time[1]. [1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death
- lotsofmangos 12y agoIt is still in constant use as the official language of the Vatican. They keep having to invent new Latin words and phrases so they can discuss things like hotpants, which are brevíssimae bracae femíneae apparently. Have a look here - http://usvsth3m.com/post/95991771713/hotpants-flirt-and-other-new-latin-words-invented http://usvsth3m.com/post/95991771713/hotpants-flirt-and-othe... The cashpoint with Latin in comic-sans is awesome. edit - translating from the latin, comic-sans is a pretty accurate font name.
- crimsonalucard 12y agoIt's better to have a shorter and noun form for referencing being born without a cerebellum. It's especially convenient for researchers who write about it and have to refer to being born without a cerebellum multiple times in a single paragraph. It's better to have a shorter and noun form for referencing cerebellar agenesis. It's especially convenient for researchers who write about it and have to refer to cerebellar agenesis multiple times in a single paragraph.
- gabipurcaru 12y agoBecause it's much more convenient to have one single name for it in all of Earth's languages.
- thaumasiotes 12y agoPerhaps you're thinking of taxonomy? English names for diseases don't set their names in other languages.
- Sharlin 12y agoDoes "cerebellar agenesis" sound English to you? Almost all things in medicine have almost universal names derived from Greek and/or Latin. Of course, until a few hundred years ago it was because those were the languages of science; these days the terms still fill the same purpose as they did back then - providing a common vocabulary for people from diverse origins.
- thaumasiotes 12y agoYes, "cerebellar agenesis" is an English term. Having Latin and Greek etymologies doesn't make the words Latin or Greek; "cerebellar" isn't even a legal Latin adjectival form. Here are the titles of the wikipedia article "Cerebellum" in some other languages: Lillehjerne (Danish) Kleinhirn (German) Parengephaliδa (Greek - Παρεγκεφαλίδα if you can read Greek) Cerebelo (Spanish) Cervelet (French) Otak kecil (Indonesian) Smadzenites (Latvian) Kisagy (Hungarian) Beyincik (Turkish) Xiaonao (Chinese - 小脑) Nobody's copying the English word (well, Tagalog and Malaysian are) -- they're all using their own native terms for "small brain".
- peterfirefly 12y agoYes, the cerebellum is know as 'lillehjernen' in Danish and that word is the only word most people know for it. Nevertheless, doctors learn the word cerebellum so they can read what doctors in other countries write. They also use the word amongst themselves. Googling for 'cerebellum ugeskrift for læger' gives plenty of hits. Likewise for 'cerebellar ugeskrift for læger'. They might write 'agenese' instead of 'agenesis', though.
- thaumasiotes 12y agoWell, I'd read it as "this condition is known as failing to develop a cerebellum". Even if everyone was born without a cerebellum and you were expected to grow yours by the age of 10, not growing one would be sensibly termed "agenesis". Also, "agenesis" is greek, like most medical terminology ;)
- skj 12y agoAha, thanks :)
- _ZeD_ 12y agoI don't know why we need an english name for every keyword in programming languages!
- wastedhours 12y agoSame with Greek! Can't wait for that "not-quite-finished-version-of-a-software-product" to be released!
- TheLoneWolfling 12y ago> These individuals probably also exhibit diminished cognitive function as well. I wonder how much of that is "the cerebellum is also involved in cognition" and how much of that is "with the rest of the brain picking up the additional load, there's less "processing power" available for other things".
- yohanatan 12y agoCould it be that the cerebellum is merely a communication channel for other parts of the brain which are more focused on cognition. After injury one would not expect immediate re-routing of these channels.
- ekr 12y agoI'm not very invested in this field, however, this "processing power" metaphor sound like those ideas "where people only use 10% of their brain". The brain doesn't work like that, it's not a general purpose computer. It's made up of several independent mechanisms, that have little to do with each other, and that have emerged at different points in evolution, driven by different forces. So their creation is rather chaotic.
- SupremumLimit 12y agoGenerally yes, but neuroplasticity does in fact exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity
- jnem 12y agoAre you saying our brains follow the Law of Demeter?
- icambron 12y agoI think that sort of misses the point of the metaphor as used here. If one big part of the brain is missing, and thus the mechanisms it enables are unavailable, some other part of the brain (at least in this case) makes up for it by providing an approximation of that mechanism. That other part of the brain is thus not able to perform whatever its normal function would be; even if it's doing double-duty, you expect that there's some capacity limit. When and if that deprioritized function involves reasoning, then you'd expect a drop in reasoning ability. Thus the "processing power" metaphor is simply saying that if a neuron is busy doing something, it can't also be busy doing other things.
- Crito 12y agoThe article mentions: "Problems in the cerebellum can lead to severe mental impairment, movement disorders, epilepsy [...]" However this seems potentially much worse than the symptoms this woman without a cerebellum is experiencing. Is it theoretically possible that people with damaged but otherwise intact cerebellum to be identified at birth so that they can have their cerebellum removed completely? My thinking is that if you do it early enough, plasticity might allow other parts of their brain to take over and do the job better than the damaged cerebellum would be able to. This is probably one of the reasons why I am not allowed to perform surgery without a license...
- x0054 12y ago> This is probably one of the reasons why I am not allowed to perform surgery without a license... Indeed :) A damaged cerebellum at birth might still be useful because it can fulfill some, if not all of the tasks it is supposed to. We don't know enough about this yet to really make any kind of call about it. For all we know, many people are borne with malformed cerebellums but never experience any problems, thus we just don't know about them.
- collyw 12y agoI did see a documentary about some young girl with a brain problem. I can't remember exactly (severe form of epilepsy?), but they wanted to do something pretty severe to her brain, and do it within the first year, as it still had the neuro-plasticity to recover at that stage.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- hmsimha 12y ago> It's interesting to note that you don't need a cerebellum to move or think, but the loss of it impairs both. Contrast this to damage to your motor cortex which can result in paralysis. This strikes me as akin to saying that you don't need a GPU to perform graphical processing, but not having it impairs your graphical processing capability. The brain wires itself throughout a human's development to take advantage of the specialization of its components and their parallelism. Damaging an adult's cerebellum once those connections are in place would be the equivalent of removing a GPU before trying to play a game that has been developed to rely on it. At least that's my simplified analogy drawn from my admittedly imperfect understanding of how the human brain and computers work.
- collyw 12y agoI don't think anyone is anywhere close to "understanding perfectly how the brain works".
- Jweb_Guru 12y agoTrying to reason about the brain like it's a computer is a very common thing for computer scientists to do. Unfortunately, it's also mostly fallacious (since for a whole host of reasons, neurons don't work like integrated circuits), and simplistic analogies like cerebellum = GPU are probably not going to give much insight into what's really going on. I'm not saying "the brain is beyond human comprehension" or anything silly like that, just that you have to approach it from a biochemical context.
- quotemstr 12y agoSure, but the brain is a Turing machine, albeit with hardware acceleration of key functions (e.g., edge detection in the visual cortex). Mathematics, not chemistry, structures the problems it solves, if not the algorithms and heuristics involved. It's utterly fascinating to see how nature tackles the same problems that we solve independently using completely different tools.