Automatism of Animals

Some Observations on Cardiac Automatism in Certain Animals

Certain aspects of the acetylcholine hypothesis of cardiac automaticity have been tested in vitro with spontaneously beating cardiac tissue from rabbits, rats, dams, and hagfish. The beat of atria from rabbits and rats may be depressed or excited by acetylcholine, depending upon the state of the tissue. Proguanil and cocaine inhibition of the beat in the rat may be antagonized by acetylcholine ...

Automatism is never a defence

In 2009, Andrew Simester’s article ‘Intoxication is Never a Defence’ effectively highlighted a point he described as ‘a simple one, and not entirely new’; that despite the longstanding (and enduring) description of the intoxication rules as a defence, this is not (and never has been) accurate.1 The classification of intoxication as a defence is one of the criminal law’s more peculiar self-delus...

Barbiturate automatism--myth or malady?

Patients admitted to the Regional Poisoning Treatment Centre at the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, were assessed to identify cases of drug automatism and those who denied the act of selfpoisoning. Only two out of 994 instances of poisoning could be attributed to barbiturate automatism. The case histories of these patients are reported. Twenty-nine patients on thirty-one admissions denied the act o...

Electrode manipulation automatism during temporal lobe seizures

OBJECTIVE To describe clinical characteristics and lateralizing value of peri-ictal electrode manipulation automatism (EMA) in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and compare our data with ictal manual automatisms described in the literature. METHODS Two-hundred and five videotaped seizures of 55 consecutive patients with refractory TLE and postoperatively seizure-free outcome were ana...

The preservation of consciousness, automatism, and movement control.