The anterodorsal nucleus of the thalamus contains a high percentage of head-direction cells whose activities are correlated with an animal's directional heading in the horizontal plane. The firing of head-direction cells could involve self-sustaining reverberating activity in a recurrent network, but the thalamus by itself lacks strong excitatory recurrent synaptic connections to sustain tonic ...

Conscious awareness of breathing requires the activation of higher brain centers and is believed to be a neural gated process. The thalamus could be responsible for the gating of respiratory sensory information to the cortex. It was reasoned that if the thalamus is the neural gate, then tracheal obstructions will modulate the gene expression profile of the thalamus. Anesthetized rats were instr...

The thalamus is a critical brain structure involved in gating and regulating the flow of sensory and cortical information. The reticular nucleus of the thalamus (TRN) sends inhibitory projections to the thalamic relay nuclei instead of projecting to the cortex as the other thalamic nuclei do. These inhibitory projections endow the TRN with the functionality to modulate and control cortical info...

The primate posterior thalamus has been proposed to contribute to pain sensation, but its precise role is unclear. This is in part because spinothalamic tract (STT) neurons that project to the posterior thalamus have received little attention. In this study, antidromic mapping was used to identify individual STT neurons with axons that projected specifically to the posterior thalamus in Macaca ...

The cardiac sympathetic afferent reflex (CSAR) is induced by stimulating the cardiac sympathetic afferents, which evokes increases in sympathetic outflow and arterial pressure. In the present study, we attempted to identify the contribution of thalamic and hypothalamic nuclei involved in the CSAR. First, we observed that there was an increase in the number of c-Fos-labeled cells in the paravent...

Thalamus has traditionally been considered as only a relay source of cortical inputs, with hierarchically organized cortical circuits serially transforming thalamic signals to cognitively-relevant representations. Given the absence of local excitatory connections within the thalamus, the notion of thalamic ‘relay’ seemed like a reasonable description over the last several decades. Recent advanc...

The thalamus is a neuroanatomic structure that has reciprocal connections with several brain regions suggested to be involved in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Recent studies have reported structural as well as functional abnormalities of the thalamus in schizophrenia. The aim of the present exploratory study was to examine D2/D3 dopamine receptors in the thalamus as well as the anterior...