HELLO,
I am translating a book called Models of mind and I need simple illustration to the following paragraph on Parkinson’s disease and to know what is meant by the words with bold:
Parkinson’s disease is a disorder that impacts the firing of neurons in the basal ganglia.
Located deep in the brain, the basal ganglia are composed of a variety of regions with elaborate Latin names.
When the
input to one region – the striatum – is perturbed by Parkinson’s disease, it knocks the rest of the basal ganglia off balance.
As a result of changes to the striatum, the subthalamic nucleus (another region of the basal ganglia) starts to fire more, which causes neurons in the globus pallidus external (yet another basal ganglia region) to fire.
But those neurons send connections back to the subthalamic nucleus that prevent those neurons from firing more – which also, in turn, shuts down the globus pallidus external itself.
The result of this
complicated web of connections is oscillations: neurons in this network fire more, then less, then more again.
These rhythms appear to be related to the movement problems Parkinson’s patients have – tremors, slowed movements and rigidity.
In 2011, researchers at the University of Freiburg built a computer model of these brain regions made up of 3,000 leaky integrate-and-fire model neurons.
In the model, disturbing the cells that represented the striatum created the same
problematic waves of activity seen in the subthalamic nuclei of Parkinson’s patients.
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