This is a very important informative piece for anyone with ataxia or other cerebellar dysfunction...or living with or educating someone with ataxia...Thanks to Dr. Schmahmann from a specialist and a parent.
My favorite quotes:
"...the cerebellum really has just one job: It takes clumsy actions or functions and makes them more refined. "It doesn't make things. It makes things better," Schmahmann says.'
"But during that time doctors and developmental health experts still didn't know why Jonathan was having so much trouble. And that turned out to be a good thing, says his father, Richard. "Not knowing what the diagnosis was we said, 'Well, let's assume he can do everything,' " he says."
JR
A Man's Incomplete Brain Reveals Cerebellum's Role In Thought And Emotion
Since his birth 33 years ago, Jonathan Keleher has been living without a cerebellum, a structure that usually contains about half the brain's neurons.
This exceedingly rare condition has left Jonathan with a distinctive way of speaking and a walk that is slightly awkward. He also lacks the balance to ride a bicycle.
But all that hasn't kept him from living on his own, holding down an office job and charming pretty much every person he meets.
"I've always been more into people than anything else," Jonathan tells me when I meet him at his parents' house in Concord, Mass., a suburb of Boston. "Why read a book or why do anything when you can be social and talk to people?"
Jonathan is also making an important contribution to neuroscience. By allowing scientists to study him and his brain, he is helping to change some long-held misconceptions about what the cerebellum does. And that, in turn, could help the hundreds of thousands of people whose cerebellums have been damaged by a stroke, infection or disease.
For decades, the cerebellum has been the "Rodney Dangerfield of the brain," says Dr. Jeremy Schmahmann, a professor of neurology at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital. It gets no respect because most scientists only know about its role in balance and fine motor control.
You can learn a lot about that role by watching someone who's been pulled over for drunken driving, Schmahmann says. "The state trooper test is a test of cerebellar function. So the effect of alcohol on cerebellar function is identified by everybody who's ever done walking a straight line or touching their finger to the nose."
But Schmahmann and a small group of other scientists have spent decades building acase that the cerebellum does a lot more than let people pass a sobriety test.
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