Word: thalamus
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Crossed Connections. Parkinsonism (the cause of which is unknown in most cases) is a disorder of nerve cells near the thalamus deep in the brain. The affected nerve cells keep on firing impulses for muscle contraction when the contractions are not necessary. Effective treatment consists of somehow interrupting these misfiring nerves...
Brain researchers think that they have traced the 6-14 peaks to an abnormality in the lower brain-either in the thalamus or the hypothalamus. This may be the result of heredity, head injury or brain inflammation. Describing Steve's case and another like it in the Archives of General Psychiatry, Dr. Woods does not suggest that the brain abnormality is the cause of violence. He reasons by analogy with epilepsy that victims must have both the abnormality and the emotional disturbance to provoke an attack...
...Most of today's victims of Parkinsonism were born within ten years of 1897, and the average age of new cases has gone up from 23 in 1920-24 to 62 this year. thalamus, deep in the brain. Though the cause of this damage in many cases cannot be traced, it is known that encephalitis is often to blame. Its effects may not show up for years...
...year in medical school, the technical jargon was almost as forbidding as to a layman. Crux of the matter: drugs influence mental function mainly through their effects on two parts of the brain: 1) the primitive midbrain's reticular (little network) formation, and 2) the connections between the thalamus (inner chamber) and the outer cortex (bark), the most sophisticated and evolutional-ly the newest part of the brain. Dr. Himwich reported...
Besides many technical details about the thalamus, the Boston researchers have learned a surprising, basic fact: thalamotomy (as the operation is called) works exactly opposite to lobotomy-it relieves the pain itself, but not the reactions of anxiety, suffering and fear of death...