Jan Evangelista Purkyně

Mm.

Like Jan Purkinje, for instance.

He managed to identify those massive, beautifully branched cells in the cerebellar cortex in eighteen thirty-seven.

The Purkinje cells-

From there, the signal fans out through a network of tiny fibers called Purkinje fibers.

These fibers were named after Jan Evangelista Purkyně, a Czech anatomist who first described them in 1839.

They distribute the electrical impulse across the ventricles in a very specific pattern, triggering them to contract from the bottom up.

That bottom-up contraction pattern is important because it pushes blood upward and out through the arteries at the top of the heart, like squeezing a tube of toothpaste from the bottom rather than the middle.

And then with- within that process of all these billions of neurons that get fired in that situation, there are some which live in the cerebellum, in the back of your brain, and they have a funny name for English people because they're named after a Czech dude who discovered them.

So they're called Purkinje cells.

We should really call them Purkinje cells.

He was a scientist who...

Clever dude, he found these things.

They come into this ponta nigra, this big bulge that's expanded in humans, spread out into the granule cell population, which is about half of the neurons in your brain.

Those granule cells then communicate via parallel fibers with these things called Purkinje cells.

There's these big, beautiful cells that project down to the cerebellar nuclei that then send that message back up into the thalamus, then back up into the cortex.

They can also go down into the brainstem.