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, 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...

In this review, the value of functional imaging for providing insight into the role of the basal ganglia in motor control is reviewed. Brain activation findings in normal subjects and Parkinson's disease patients are examined and evidence supporting the existence for functionally independent distributed basal ganglia-frontal loops is presented. It is argued that the basal ganglia probably act t...

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 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...

Though many causes have been considered from mental or anatomical viewpoint, the mechanism of stuttering is not known yet. One candidate for the stuttering occurrence is a dysfunction of basal ganglia. However the detailed relation between the basal ganglia dysfunction and the stuttering is not understood. In this study, based on anatomical, physiological and clinical evidences, we propose a fu...

Here we review a role of a basal ganglia-brainstem (BG-BS) system throughout the mesopontine tegmentum in the control of various types of behavioral expression. First the basal ganglia-brainstem system may contribute to an automatic control of movements, such as rhythmic limb movements and adjustment of postural muscle tone during locomotion, which occurs in conjunction with voluntary control p...

In this research, an improved model of Parkinsonian tremor is presented by using a mathematical and computational approach. Parkinson’s disease (PD), abnormal signal produced basal ganglia (BG). This goes to the thalamus, then enters cortex after interaction with peripheral system muscle finally appears as tremor. model, all mentioned process are simulated. Also, skeletal well central nervous (...

The basal ganglia are a group of subcortical nuclei involved in a variety of processes, including motor, associative, cognitive, and mnemonic functions. The dorsal division of the basal ganglia consists of the striatum (divided into the caudate nucleus and putamen by the internal capsule in primates and other species), the external segment of the globus pallidus (GPe; simply globus pallidus in ...

This is the introductory chapter to an edited volume comprising 18 chapters written by 38 specially selected authors covering the anatomy, physiology, biochemistry/pharmacology and behavioral aspects of GABA in the basal ganglia. In this chapter the various nuclei of the basal ganglia are defined and their cellular structure, connections and function reviewed in brief in order to provide an ori...