Life Sciences Commons^™

Shining Light On An Amygdala -- Brainstem Connection Important For Attention Processing, Jose Carlos Cano

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

We are continuously being exposed to an exorbitant amount of sensory information, which should result overwhelming. However, the nervous system operates several intrinsic sensory filtering mechanisms that allow us to cope with such sensory cluttering and shape appropriate behavior. Sensorimotor gating is a pre-attentive neuronal filtering mechanism that gates superfluous sensory information, and orients attentional resources towards salient information processing. Its relevance becomes in individuals suffering from schizophrenia and several otherwise unrelated neuropsychiatric disorders where sensorimotor gating is impaired. To understand the neural impaired mechanisms, extensive research studies have focused on first identifying the neural substrates underlying sensorimotor gating. This …