(2012) focused their subsequent analyses on synchrony effects both www.selleckchem.com/products/fg-4592.html within pulvinar as well as between the cortical areas and pulvinar, respectively. Here Saalmann et al. (2012) report an attention-dependent increase in coherence between pulvinar spikes and local

field potentials (LFPs) in an alpha-frequency band peaking around 12 Hz, suggesting that attention enhances thalamo-cortical reverberation in this particular frequency band. In agreement with this scenario, LFP coherence between pulvinar and cortex also increased with attention at this frequency. This finding extends earlier observations of alpha coherence between thalamus and cortex in the canine brain (Lopes da Silva et al., 1980). Going one step further in testing the role of pulvinar as pacemaker for cortical alpha oscillations, Saalmann et al. (2012) use conditional Granger causality analysis to determine

the direction of interactions. The findings suggest that the alpha coherence between cortical areas is entirely driven by the pulvinar and that this pulvinar-mediated alpha coherence is enhanced with attention. These results implicate the pulvinar in actively modulating cortico-cortical synchrony as a function of attentional allocation, challenging the prevailing view that higher cognitive functions are exclusively driven by and within the cortex. The most unexpected findings of Saalmann et al. (2012) are that visual click here stimulation induces rather than reduces alpha-band activity and that attention enhances rather than diminishes it. Alpha was discovered by Berger as the rhythm that is strongest when the brain is not externally stimulated, coining the term “idling rhythm.”

Since then, countless studies confirmed that alpha in a given cortical area is strongest when this area is not functionally activated (Jensen and Mazaheri, 2010). Likewise, alpha is enhanced when attention is disengaged from a given area, i.e., when attention is directed to a different modality, a different spatial location, or a different stimulus than the ones activating a given cortical region (Jensen and Mazaheri, 2010). Bumetanide Far fewer studies have reported stimulus or attention-related increases of alpha-band activity. It is difficult to integrate these studies into a coherent model. Yet, one hint for reconciling the different observations might come from those studies that have differentiated between cortical layers and suggest multiple alpha generators (Buffalo et al., 2011; Bollimunta et al., 2008). Buffalo et al. (2011) report that visual stimulation has opposite effects on two alpha generators in the supra- and infragranular cortical layers of early visual cortex: while visual stimulation reduced supragranular alpha, it enhanced infragranular alpha. The pulvinar alpha reported by Saalmann et al.