What if the cerebellum works less like a learning machine and more like an interrupt handler , resetting circuits and gating sensory information depending on what the animal is doing? Sam Wang shares how advanced optical imaging is rewriting our understanding of cerebellar function. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Sam Wang came to neuroscience from physics, drawn to the cerebellum by its deceptively simple architecture: a small number of cell types arranged in a circuit that seemed ripe for theoretical analysis. In this interview, he describes how his laboratory's optical imaging methods have revealed surprising dynamics in the climbing fiber system , the slow, one-hertz input pathway from the inferior olive that has long puzzled researchers. Wang reframes these climbing fiber signals as interrupt signals th ...