The medial diencephalon, in particular the mammillary bodies and anterior thalamic nuclei, has long been linked to memory amnesia. provide a dense input into via mammillothalamic tract. In both animal models, patients, lesions of bodies, tract nuclei all produce severe impairments temporal contextual memory, yet it is uncertain why these regions are critical. Mounting evidence from electrophysi...

The thalamus is a paired structure joined at the midline and located at the center of the brain (Figure 10.1 ). Each half is roughly the size of a walnut. The main part of the thalamus is divided into a number of discrete regions, known as relay nuclei. These contain the relay cells that project to the cerebral cortex. (In this chapter, cortex refers to neocortex, which does not include the hip...

Head-direction cells are neurons that signal a rat's directional heading in the horizontal plane. Head-direction cells in the anterior thalamus are anticipatory, so that their firing rate is better correlated with the rat's future head direction than with the present or past head direction. We recorded single-unit activity from head-direction cells in the anterior thalamus of freely moving rats...

Anterograde labeling of the cervical spinothalamic tract was combined with retrograde labeling of thalamocortical cells projecting to the hand region of the second somatosensory cortex (hSII) to identify likely sites in the thalamus for processing and transmitting nociceptive information to hSII. Anterograde labeling of terminals was done with 2% WGA-HRP injections in the cervical enlargement; ...

The inhibitory thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) intercepts and modulates all corticothalamic and thalamocortical communications. Previous studies showed that projections from sensory and motor cortices originate in layer VI and terminate as small boutons in central and caudal TRN. Here we show that prefrontal projections to TRN in rhesus monkeys have a different topographic organization and mod...

The thalamus plays a key role in filtering or gating information and has extensive interconnectivity with other brain regions. Recent studies provide evidence of thalamus abnormality in schizophrenia, but the resting functional networks of the thalamus in schizophrenia is still unclear. We characterize the thalamic resting-state networks (RSNs) in 72 patients with schizophrenia and 73 healthy c...