Recent observations of single axons and review of older literature show that axons afferent to the thalamus commonly branch, sending one branch to the thalamus and another to a motor or premotor center of the brain stem. That is, the messages that the thalamus relays to the cerebral cortex can be regarded as copies of motor instructions. This pattern of axonal branching is reviewed, particularl...

Striatal targets related to the dorsal thalamus were studied in reptiles. The lateral striatum projects to globus pallidus and to three cellular groups associated to the lateral forebrain bundle: the anterior entopeduncular nucleus, the suprapeduncular nucleus, and the ventromedial thalamic nucleus. The projection is heavier on the suprapeduncular nucleus, which in turn projects on nucleus rotu...

Essential tremor can be suppressed with chronic, bilateral deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the ventralis intermedius nucleus (Vim), the cerebellar receiving area of the motor thalamus. The goal in this study was to correlate the location of the electrodes with the clinical efficacy of DBS in a patient with essential tremor. The authors report on a woman with essential tremor in whom chronic bil...

It has been posited that the regulation of burst/tonic firing in the thalamus could function as a mechanism for controlling not only how much but what kind of information is conveyed to downstream cortical targets. Yet how this gating mechanism is adaptively modulated on fast timescales by ongoing sensory inputs in rich sensory environments remains unknown. Using single-unit recordings in the r...

The thalamic complex is an essential part of the brain that requires a combination of specialized activities to attain its final complexity. In the following review we will describe the induction process of the mid-diencephalic organizer (MDO) where three different signaling pathways merge: Wnt, Shh, and Fgf. Here, we dissect the function of each signaling pathway in the thalamus in chronologic...

One of the most compelling questions still unanswered in neuroscience is how consciousness arises. In this article, we examine visual processing, the parietal lobe, and contralateral neglect syndrome as a window into consciousness and how the brain functions as the mind and we introduce a mechanism for the processing of visual information and its role in consciousness. We propose that conscious...

As the central relay station of the human brain, the thalamus modulates sensory signals to and from the cerebral cortex. The reciprocal connectivity between the cerebral cortex and the thalamus is believed to play an essential role in consciousness and various neurological disorders. Thus, in-vivo analysis of thalamo-cortical connectivity is important for our understanding of normal and patholo...

There is currently growing interest in, and increasing evidence for, cross-frequency interactions between electrical field oscillations in the brains of various organisms. A number of theories have linked such interactions to crucial features of neuronal function and cognition. In mammals, these interactions have mostly been reported in the neocortex and hippocampus, and it remains unexplored w...

This study aimed to identify subunits of the basal ganglia and thalamus and to investigate the functional connectivity among these anatomically segregated subdivisions and the cerebral cortex in healthy subjects. For this purpose, we introduced multilevel independent component analysis (ICA) of the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). After applying ICA to the whole brain...

The thalamus is a central brain region that plays a crucial role in distributing incoming sensory information to appropriate regions of the cortex. The thalamus develops in the posterior part of the embryonic forebrain, where early cell fate decisions are controlled by a local signaling center - the mid-diencephalic organizer - which forms at the boundary between prospective prethalamus and tha...