Mapping the brain in practice Flashcards
What is the visual pathway in mammals?
What is the thalamus’s function and how does it coordinate activity in the cortex?
Your thalamus serves as the main relay station for your brain. All motor and sensory signals (except smell) pass through this structure in the center of your brain. Your thalamus is arranged in regions, called nuclei, that each possesses specialization for dealing with that particular information.
two main ways: a) by transferring sensory information from the periphery of the body (such as the eyes) to higher cortical regions where this information will be and b) by coordinating the interaction between different areas of the cortex to support the elaboration of sensory information into cognition and other conscious behaviours.
What are the 6 main types of neurons that make up the layers of the retina?
Why they are special?
visual information is detected by the retinal circuitry in its separate components, so that some cells will only respond and encode contours, other specific colours, others movement etc. therefore at the very onset, the visual pathway is an ensemble of parallel pathways, each one encoding a particular feature of the visual field.
Which LGN part it’s the part of the pathway that relays retinal information to the cortex?
The LGN contains three different parts, and it is important to remember that we are only considering the dorsal part.
