Seasonal changes in body weight, pineal hydroxyindole-O-methyltransferase activity (HIOMT) and pineal gland weight were analysed for adult male viscacha (Lagostomus maximus maximus). The viscacha is a nocturnal rodent restricted to the Argentinian pampas which lives in large colonies in extensive burrow systems. Animals were captured monthly, at night, near their burrows, in the vicinity of San...

The treatment for the pineal region tumors depends on tumor histology. Nowadays, germinomas can be cured by radiotherapy and chemotherapy without surgical resection but the other pineal region tumors should be primary treated by surgery. Two microsurgical approaches, the infratentorial supracerebellar and the occipital transtentorial, are accepted as the main standard accesses to the pineal reg...

This article reexamines the controversial doctrine of the pineal gland in Cartesian psychophysiology. It argues initially that Descartes' combined metaphysics and natural philosophy yield a distinctly human subject who is rational, willful, but also a living and embodied being in the world, formed in the union and through the dynamics of the interaction between the soul and the body. However, D...

The pineal body was for a long time looked upon as a functionless remnant and from a phylogenetical point of view was accepted as a rudiment of the third eye, which is, at the present time, only found in hatteria punctata. As far as is known an epiphysis is present in all ver tebrates with the exception of mixinoids and crocodilia. In man the pineal body is pear shaped, lies just beneath the sp...

OBJECTIVE The problem of the substantial union of the soul and the body and therefore the mechanisms of interaction between them represents the core of the Cartesian dualistic philosophy. This philosophy is based upon a neuroanatomical obvious misconception, consisting mainly on a wrong intraventricular position of the pineal gland and its capacity of movement to act as a valve regulating the f...