The Cerebellum Deeply Influences Our Thoughts and Emotions.
The cerebellum is only 10% of brain volume but holds over 50% of the brain’s total neurons. Based on this disproportion, my father would always say, “We don’t know exactly what the cerebellum is doing, but whatever it’s doing, it’s doing a lot of it.”
My father had a hunch that the cerebellum might play a role in higher-order thinking and might somehow be connected to the deeper parts of our psyche. From a spiritual perspective, my dad also thought the cerebellum might somehow be affiliated with the subconscious reservoirs of one’s soul.
When I got a book deal with St. Martin’s Press to write The Athlete’s Way back in 2005, I saw it as an opportunity to use a mass-market publishing house to advance potentially esoteric ideas about the cerebellum to a general audience.
My father and I spoke every day while I was writing the manuscript. Because I am not a scientist, I could stick my neck out and say things about the cerebellum from my “athletic perspective” that my father couldn’t publish in a peer-reviewed medical journal.
Our objective was to get a dialogue started about the cerebellum and move the conversation away from ubiquitous talk of “left brain-right brain” and towards what we both saw as the more salient divide between what I coined as “up brain-down brain.” Under this new split-brain model, the cerebrum is the “up brain” and the cerebellum is the “down brain.” These names were a direct and cogent response to “left brain-right brain.”
“In the same way that the cerebellum regulates the rate, rhythm, force and accuracy of movements, so does it regulate the speed, consistency, capacity, and appropriateness of mental and cognitive processes … Dysmetria of movement is matched, in the cognitive realm, by an unpredictability and illogic to social and societal interaction. The overshoot and inability in the motor system to check parameters of movement are equated with a mismatch between reality and perceived reality, and erratic attempts to correct errors of thought and behavior.”
Schmahmanns’s dysmetria of thought theory is the missing link that I’ve been looking for—this theory helps to connect the dots on how the cerebellum plays a critical role in creating superfluidity between our thoughts, actions, emotions, and social interactions.
My lecture at Columbia titled “Superfluidity” is the topic of my book-in-progress of the same title. Like Schmahmann, I believe that the cerebellum is responsible for creating fluidity of both movement and many cognitive processes. My hypothesis is that maximizing brain function and human potential can be achieved by optimizing the interconnectivity between each of the brain’s four hemispheres.
Below is a rudimentary sketch I made a few years ago which illustrates my theory of “superfluidity” which is created through the synchronicity of connectivity between the gray and white matter of both hemispheres of the cerebrum and the cerebellum.
As an educated guess, I suspect that optimal brain function is obtained when all four brain hemispheres are working together in perfect harmony at an electrical, chemical, and architectural level. This is illustrated in my sketch above as represented by the multi-directional flow of arrows creating white matter pathways in every direction across all four brain hemispheres.
I believe that a peak state of consciousness occurs when every nook and cranny of each of your brain’s four hemispheres are working together in synchronicity. I call this a state of “superfluidity” because it represents absolutely zero friction, zero entropy and zero viscosity between thought, action, and emotion.
Conclusion: The Cerebellum Could Take Center Stage in 21st Century Neuropsychiatry
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201503/the-cerebellum-deeply-influences-our-thoughts-and-emotions