Seminars are open to all visitors and start Monday at 16:00 sharp. Coffee and tea will be served from 15:45. The seminar series lectures are in a colloquiumzaal at the third floor (entrance level) of the Faculty building of Erasmus MC.
Narender Ramnani
The Primate Cortico-Cerebellar System: Evolution and Function
| 2008-06-02 | Room: Coll. K |
I will discuss the cerebellum in the context of its connectivity with the cerebral cortex (prefrontal cortex in particular), and explain the anatomical basis of a functional hypothesis about the prefrontal-cerebellar loop. I will describe our anatomical studies that investigate the evolution of this loop using diffusion and structural imaging data from a range of extant primates. The first of these used fibre tractography to show that cortico-pontine contributions from the prefrontal cortex have expanded massively in the human brain. The second used volumetry (comparing humans with New World monkeys and Chimpanzees) to demonstrate the comparatively rapid expansion of cerebellar cortical areas that receive projections from the prefrontal cortex. I will then discuss a series of functional MRI studies that investigate information processing in prefrontal-projecting areas of the human cerebellum, particularly in relation to the processing symbolic, rule-based information, and information traffic between the human cerebellum and prefrontal cortex.