What are the five functions of the thalamus?

What are the five functions of the thalamus?

While the thalamus is classically known for its roles as a sensory relay in visual, auditory, somatosensory, and gustatory systems, it also has significant roles in motor activity, emotion, memory, arousal, and other sensorimotor association functions.

What is the main function of the thalamus?

Your thalamus is your body’s information relay station. All information from your body’s senses (except smell) must be processed through your thalamus before being sent to your brain’s cerebral cortex for interpretation. Your thalamus also plays a role in sleep, wakefulness, consciousness, learning and memory.

Does the thalamus control eyes?

Different nuclei in the central thalamus receive inputs from the brainstem, the basal ganglia, and the cerebellum, and send outputs to the eye movement-related areas in the cortex, including the frontal eye field, the supplementary eye field, and the lateral prefrontal cortex.

Does the thalamus control behavior?

Growing evidence shows that the thalamus, beyond serving as an information relaying center, has key roles in motivated behaviors (Martin-Fardon and Boutrel, 2012; James and Dayas, 2013; Kirouac, 2015; Millan et al., 2017; Huang et al., 2018; Choi et al., 2019; Otis et al., 2019; McNally, 2021).

What senses does the thalamus control?

The thalamus (from the Greek thalamos or inner chamber) transmits 98 percent of sensory information to the cortex, including vision, taste, touch and balance; the only sense that doesn’t pass through this brain region is smell.

What part of your brain controls your eyesight?

Occipital lobe. The occipital lobe is the back part of the brain that is involved with vision.

What controls eye movement in the brain?

The cerebellum plays a pivotal role in the control of eye movements. Its core function is to optimize ocular motor performance so that images of objects of interest are promptly brought to the fovea – where visual acuity is best – and kept quietly there, so the brain has time to analyze and interpret the visual scene.

How does the thalamus affect behavior?

Connections to structures such as the hippocampus and other parts of the limbic system suggest the thalamus plays a role in memory, especially episodic memory, as well as with learning and emotions. The thalamus is also believed to be involved in the regulation of sleep, wakefulness, and arousal.

What disorders are associated with the thalamus?

Below are MeSH descriptors whose meaning is related to “Thalamic Diseases”.

• Brain Diseases.
• Acute Febrile Encephalopathy.
• Akinetic Mutism.
• Amblyopia.
• Amnesia, Transient Global.
• Auditory Diseases, Central.
• Basal Ganglia Diseases.
• Brain Abscess.

Can you survive without a thalamus?

“The ultimate reality is that without thalamus, the cortex is useless, it’s not receiving any information in the first place,” said Theyel, a postdoctoral researcher. “And if this other information-bearing pathway is really critical, it’s involved in higher-order cortical functioning as well.”