Pathological laughter is an uncommon symptom usually caused by bilateral, diffuse cerebral lesions. It has rarely been reported in association with isolated cerebral lesions. Midbrain involvement causing pathological laughter is extremely unusual. We describe three patients who developed pathological laughter after midbrain and pontine-midbrain infarction. In two patients a small infarction in ...

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) in the midbrain at 7 Tesla suffers from unexpectedly low temporal signal to noise ratio (TSNR) compared to other brain regions. Various methodologies were used in this study to quantitatively identify causes of the noise and signal differences in midbrain fMRI data. The influence of physiological noise sources was examined using RETROICOR, phase regr...

Navigating the physical world requires learning probabilistic associations between sensory events and their change in time (volatility). Bayesian accounts of this process rest on hierarchical prediction errors (PEs) that are weighted by estimates uncertainty (or its inverse, precision). In a previous fMRI study we found low-level precision-weighted PEs about visual outcomes (that update beliefs...

We report a patient with unilateral midbrain hemorrhage which caused ipsilateral complete oculomotor nerve palsy with pupillary involvement, contralateral upgaze paresis, contralateral limb ataxia and Parinaud’s syndrome. CT scan and MRI brain demonstrated a hemorrhage in the left paramedian midbrain probably involving the oculomotor fascicles; extension of the hemorrhage to the most rostral mi...

• Midbrain dopaminergic neuron transcription factors modulate the long-term survival and maintenance of these neurons. Understanding developmental pathways might lead to a better insight into their degeneration in Parkinson's disease. Phylogenetic profiling was used identify molecular interactions correlated with factors. Two distinct evolutionary pathways, pertaining early late novel links wer...

In spinal cord and hindbrain development, neurons are generated as longitudinal cell columns aligned with the ventral and dorsal midlines. For rostral brain, however, the fundamental structure of early neuronal patterning remains poorly understood. We report here that, in the chick embryo, the ventral midbrain is remarkably regular in its cellular and molecular organization; it is arranged as a...

Long-lasting changes in the brain or 'brain plasticity' underlie adaptive behavior and brain repair following disease or injury. Furthermore, interactions with our environment can induce brain plasticity. Increasingly, research is trying to identify which environments stimulate brain plasticity beneficial for treating brain and behavioral disorders. Two environmental manipulations are described...