Thalamus articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Itch is known to involve the parabrachial nucleus, but the following transmission nodes remain elusive. Here, the authors show in male mice that the central medial thalamic nucleus—medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) pathway transmits itch signals and is involved in both acute scratching and chronic itch-related affective behavior, with an altered excitatory/inhibitory balance in mPFC in chronic itch models.

    • Jia-Ni Li
    • , Xue-Mei Wu
    •  & Yun-Qing Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In the primary auditory cortex, visual or tactile stimuli can modulate acoustically-driven activity. Here, the authors show that circuits linking the primary somatosensory cortex to both the auditory midbrain and thalamus allow tactile inputs to modulate auditory thalamocortical processing.

    • Michael Lohse
    • , Johannes C. Dahmen
    •  & Andrew J. King

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How thalamic sensory relays participate in plasticity upon associative fear learning and stable long-term sensory coding remains unknown. The authors show that auditory thalamus neurons exhibit heterogeneous plasticity patterns after learning while population level encoding of auditory stimuli remains stable across days.

    • James Alexander Taylor
    • , Masashi Hasegawa
    •  & Jan Gründemann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    During NREM sleep, spindles emerge from thalamocortical interactions. Here the authors carry out multisite thalamic and cortical recordings in freely behaving mice, to investigate the role of other non-classical thalamic sites in sleep spindle generation.

    • Mojtaba Bandarabadi
    • , Carolina Gutierrez Herrera
    •  & Antoine R. Adamantidis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Auditory contrast gain control helps us perceive sounds as constant despite changes in the environment or background noise. Here, the authors show that neurons in the auditory thalamus and midbrain of mice display independent contrast gain control, not just the cortex as previously thought.

    • Michael Lohse
    • , Victoria M. Bajo
    •  & Ben D. B. Willmore

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In congenitally blind people, tactile stimuli can activate the occipital (visual) cortex. Here, the authors show using magnetoencephalography (MEG) that occipital activation can occur within 35 ms following tactile stimulation, suggesting the existence of a fast thalamocortical pathway for touch in congenitally blind humans.

    • Franziska Müller
    • , Guiomar Niso
    •  & Ron Kupers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The pulvinar is involved in vision and attention, but its interactions with other brain regions are little-studied. Here, using fMRI the authors show that the human pulvinar has widespread functional coupling with cortical areas that reflects its intrinsic organization and the topographic layout of cortex.

    • Michael J. Arcaro
    • , Mark A. Pinsk
    •  & Sabine Kastner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Thalamocortical dysrhythmia has been proposed to occur in a number of neurological and psychiatric disorders. Here, the authors use a data-driven approach to demonstrate thalamocortical dysrhythmia occurs in individuals with Parkinson’s disease, neuropathic pain, tinnitus, and depression.

    • Sven Vanneste
    • , Jae-Jin Song
    •  & Dirk De Ridder

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The function of receptor desensitization in vivo is not well understood. Here, the authors show that deletion of CKAMP44, an AMPAR auxiliary protein that modulates desensitization of AMPAR currents, affects synaptic facilitation at retinogeniculate synapses and visually-evoked firing in awake mice.

    • Xufeng Chen
    • , Muhammad Aslam
    •  & Jakob von Engelhardt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Perception can be explained by predictive coding, but it is unclear how this theory applies at the single-neuron level. Here, authors describe how auditory patterns are encoded and detected by single neurons along the auditory pathway, demonstrating that prediction error exists in single auditory neurons.

    • Gloria G. Parras
    • , Javier Nieto-Diego
    •  & Manuel S. Malmierca

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The responses of striatal GABAergic interneurons to thalamic inputs are not well characterised. Here, the authors demonstrate that complex intrastriatal circuitry is responsible for thalamic-evoked monosynaptic and disynaptic excitation in NPY-NGF interneurons but a disynaptic inhibition in the NPY-PLTS.

    • Maxime Assous
    • , Jaime Kaminer
    •  & James M. Tepper

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Learning to reinforce rewarding decisions and avoiding repeated mistakes is critical, yet the neural systems mediating feedback processing in value-guided choices remain elusive. Here the authors uncover the spatiotemporal dynamics of two separate but interacting value systems during learning.

    • Elsa Fouragnan
    • , Chris Retzler
    •  & Marios G. Philiastides

  • Article |

    The pulvinar nucleus is involved in modulating visual information. Fischer and Whitney use brain imaging to study the pulvinar during visual attention, and find that the positions and orientations of attended objects are precisely encoded in the pulvinar, while information about ignored objects is gated out.

    • Jason Fischer
    •  & David Whitney

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