Neurochemical compartmentalization within the pigeon basal ganglia

Emergent basal ganglia pathology within computational models.

The Basal Ganglia

Progress in our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the cardinal motor abnormalities of Parkinson’s disease (PD), in particular akinesia and bradykinesia and their treatment, has been remarkable. Notable accomplishments include insights into the functional organization of the basal ganglia and their place in the motor system as components of a family of parallel cortico-subcortical circu...

The basal ganglia

The basal ganglia, said Kinnear-Wilson in the 1920s, have all the clarity of a dark basement. And so it has remained for the better part of a century. There are now major new ideas about what these deeplying structures in the forebrain may be doing. Lesions of the basal ganglia lead to devastating motor disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease. In addition, the basal ga...

The Basal Ganglia

That the basal ganglia are related to the control of movement has been known for a long time; diseases affecting primarily the basal ganglia lead to characteristic disturbances of movement and of resting muscle tone. Improved methods for tracing fiber connections have shown, however, that the main efferent connections of the basal ganglia do not descend to motor nuclei in the brain stem and spi...

The Basal Ganglia

The cortex constituting Broca’s area does not exist in isolation. Rather, like other cortical regions, Broca’s area is connected to other brain structures, which likely play closely related functional roles. This paper focuses on the basal ganglia, a set of subcortical structures that project through topographically organized “channels” via the thalamus to different frontal regions. It is hypot...