How does a single Purkinje cell receiving half a million inputs learn to produce a precisely timed eye blink, and why has the cerebellum been so difficult to understand despite its crystalline simplicity? Germund Hesslow reveals what decades of painstaking physiology have uncovered.

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Germund Hesslow describes his journey from Freudian psychology to hardcore cerebellar physiology, drawn by the exceptional quality of research in the Lund laboratory rather than the subject matter itself. The serendipitous discovery that Pavlovian conditioning occurs in the cerebellum united his interests in learning with his technical expertise, launching a 25-year investigation into how associative memory is formed at the cellular level. Working with a decerebrate preparation that ret ...