Oversized, auditory responsive units of rostral, mid, and posterolateral thalamus.
Activity was recorded from 343 units of rostral, mid, and posterolateral thalamus following a conditioned click stimulus (CS). Over 40% of units responded with increased discharge in cats conditioned to blink to the CS. Twenty-nine units with short latency (less than 40 ms) responses were injected intracellularly with phaseolus lectin and identified morphologically; 83% had long, thick primary dendrites with smaller secondary branches. Almost half (46%) had larger somata than the largest previously described thalamic neurons of this morphologic classification. The results suggest that a previously unidentified class of oversized cells is likely to contain many short latency, auditory responsive units. A substantial number of these cells (36%) projected extrathalamically into the internal capsule, and thus may constitute a new auditory pathway between thalamus and cortex.
Chizhevsky
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Mental Retardation Research Center, UCLA Medical Center 90024.
Woody
C D
CD
Gruen
E
E
Melamed
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O
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000818:Animals; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001767:Blinking / Q000502:physiology; D002415:Cats; D003214:Conditioning, Classical / Q000502:physiology; D003712:Dendrites / Q000187:drug effects; D004594:Electrophysiology; D006651:Histocytochemistry; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D010835:Phytohemagglutinins; D013788:Thalamus / Q000166:cytology / Q000502:physiology*
D010835:Phytohemagglutinins