Decrypting a brain enigma

Abstract

The brain has tremendous information processing power and computational capacity. Neuroscientists have made great efforts to unravel how the brain encodes, decodes and processes information, but deconstructing these computations is a difficult task. On page 439 of this issue, Herzfeld et al.1 use monkeys to masterfully unearth how one of the brain's most intriguing structures, the cerebellum, efficiently encodes - and perhaps subsequently decodes - the information needed to control the quick, jerky eye movements known as saccades, which occur as the eye explores a scene.