Projections from the posterior thalamus to the amygdala have been implicated in the processing of the emotional significance of acoustic stimuli. The aim of the present studies was to determine which areas of the amygdala receive afferents from posterior thalamic structures that, in turn, receive afferents (presumably acoustic afferents) from the inferior colliculus. Projections from the poster...

As is evident from the pathological consequences of its absence in narcolepsy, orexin (hypocretin) appears to be critical for the maintenance of wakefulness. Via diffuse projections through the brain, orexin-containing neurons in the hypothalamus may act on a number of wake-promoting systems. Among these are the intralaminar and midline thalamic nuclei, which project in turn in a widespread man...

The vestibular system provides the brain with sensory signals about three-dimensional head rotations and translations. These signals are important for postural and oculomotor control, as well as for spatial and bodily perception and cognition, and they are subtended by pathways running from the vestibular nuclei to the thalamus, cerebellum and the "vestibular cortex." The present review summari...

KEY POINTS The lateral posterior and posterior thalamic nuclei have been implicated in aspects of visually guided behaviour and reflex responses to light, including those dependent on melanopsin photoreception. Here we investigated the extent and basic properties of visually evoked activity across the mouse lateral posterior and posterior thalamus. We show that a subset of retinal projections t...

The study of 3 personal cases and 5 published cases of unilateral infarct limited to the territory of the tuberothalamic artery suggests that this syndrome should be differentiated from the other thalamic syndromes. The onset is usually sudden, with moderate contralateral weakness. Sensory changes may be present but remain mild. The patients are apathetic, show perseveration and may be disorien...

Projections from thalamic intralaminar nuclei convey sensory signals to striatal cholinergic interneurons. These neurons respond with a pause in their pacemaking activity, enabling synaptic integration with cortical inputs to medium spiny neurons (MSNs), thus playing a crucial role in motor function. In mice with the DYT1 dystonia mutation, stimulation of thalamostriatal axons, mimicking a resp...

Mammillary body neurons projecting to the thalamus were identified by injecting retrograde tracers into the medial thalamus of macaque monkeys. The source of the thalamic projections from the medial mammillary nucleus showed strikingly different patterns of organization depending on the site of the injection within the two anterior thalamic nuclei, anterior medialis and anterior ventralis. Thes...

Fear learning occurs in response to positive prediction error, when the expected outcome of a conditioning trial exceeds that predicted by the conditioned stimuli present. This role for error in Pavlovian association formation is best exemplified by the phenomenon of associative blocking, whereby prior fear conditioning of conditioned stimulus (CS) A is able to prevent learning to CSB when they...

BACKGROUND The ability to encode noxious stimulus intensity is essential for the neural processing of pain perception. It is well accepted that the intensity information is transmitted within both sensory and affective pathways. However, it remains unclear what the encoding patterns are in the thalamocortical brain regions, and whether the dual pain systems share similar responsibility in inten...