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Song of the Cerebellum

January 30, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Song of the Cerebellum

On a warm spring night in 2024, science journalist Rachel Gross walked into a gay bar in Brooklyn called the Branded Saloon, her usual Thursday karaoke spot. She got on stage and started singing Savage Garden's "Crash and Burn." At the chorus, nothing came out of her mouth—just air. The notes weren't translating from her brain to her vocal cords. She finished the song anyway, figuring she'd just bombed, which she was used to.

But that same day, she'd noticed her handwriting was illegible. The next day, her speech was slurred. The day after that, she went for a run and felt like she was forcing her limbs to move in tandem. She went to the hospital, where a CT scan revealed a bleed in the back of her brain. She'd had a stroke. The cause was a cavernoma—a small cluster of blood vessels shaped like a raspberry that had burst. The bleed was in her cerebellum, a part of the brain the surgeons described as "redundant," "practically vestigial." One told her you can remove a third of it and people don't even notice. "When you wake up," he said, "you might feel a little clumsy, but you'll still be you."

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (01:50) **Rachel Gross's Stroke and the "Vestigial" Cerebellum** - Science journalist Rachel Gross describes the onset of her stroke symptoms during karaoke, a run, and slurred speech, leading to a hospital visit.
  • 2 (09:50) **The "Little Brain" and Its Dismissed History** - Rachel begins investigating the cerebellum's known function, starting with its anatomical history and the long-held belief that it is purely a motor control center.
  • 3 (13:30) **A Paradigm Shift: The Cerebellum's Hidden Connections** - Jeremy Schmahmann recounts the moment he began to suspect the cerebellum does more than motor control, leading to a discovery that upended the old model.
  • 4 (17:28) **Evolutionary Surprise: The Cerebellum's Rise in Humans** - Evolutionary biologist Robert Barton shows that the cerebellum expanded faster than the neocortex during human evolution.
  • 5 (24:35) **The Invisible Conductor of Thought and Emotion** - Jeremy Schmahmann and others argue the cerebellum performs the same "orchestrating" function for cognition and emotion as it does for movement.
  • 6 (31:07) **The Mind-Body Link and the "Cinderella" of the Brain** - The episode concludes that the cerebellum challenges the Western dualism of mind vs. body, linking movement intrinsically to thought.
  • 7 (34:33) **The Science of Recovery and the Quest for Karaoke** - Rachel turns to the science of neuroplasticity, focusing on motivation as the key to recovery.

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Show Notes

One spring evening in 2024, a science journalist named Rachel Gross bombed at karaoke. The culprit was a bleed in a fist-sized clump of neurons tucked down in the back of her brain called the cerebellum. A couple weeks later, her doctors took a bit of it out, assuring her it was just helping her with motor coordination — she might be a bit clumsy for a while, but she’d still be herself. But afterwards, she didn't feel like herself. So she dove into the dusty basement of the brain (and brain science) to figure out why. What Rachel found was a burgeoning new frontier in neuroscience. We learn what singing Shakira on stage has to do with reaching for a cup of coffee — and how the surprising relationship between the two is making us rethink what we think about thinking.

Special thanks to Warzone Karaoke at Branded Saloon, Dr. Joanne Loewy and the Singing Together, Measure by Measure choir at the Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine  (http://musicandmedicine.org/) at Mount Sinai Union Square, Dag Spicer and the Computer History Museum, Désirée Lie, Mark Gross, Daniel A. Gross, Brittany Aguilar, and, of course, Shakira.

EPISODE CREDITS: 
Reported by - Rachel Gross
Produced by - Sindhu Gnanasambandan

EPISODE CITATIONS:

Articles -

Books - 

  • Vagina Obscura (https://www.rachelegross.com/book), by Rachel E. Gross

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