What is the function of the claustrum?

Pretty much everyone is interested in the big questions about the brain, and the biggest big question is: what is consciousness? Just as historically the vitalists could not imagine how life can be explained by just physics and chemistry — they believed that a non-physical 'life force' had to be involved — the dualists of today cannot believe our experience of the feeling of love or the redness of red could arise just through nerve impulses in a bunch of brain cells.

Francis Crick believed that, in biology, structure is the natural path to understanding function. In his later career, he applied this dictum to the study of consciousness.

The claustrum is a thin, irregular, sheet-like neuronal structure hidden beneath the inner surface of the neocortex in the general region of the insula. Its function is enigmatic. Its anatomy is quite remarkable in that it receives input from almost all regions of cortex and projects back to almost all regions of cortex. We here briefly summarize what is known about the claustrum, speculate on its possible relationship to the processes that give rise to integrated conscious percepts, propose mechanisms that enable information to travel widely within the claustrum and discuss experiments to address these questions.

Full text

• The cortical projection upon the claustrum
• The Comparative Anatomy of the Nucleus Amygdalae, the Claustrum and the Insular Cortex

Does erotic stimulus presentation design affect brain activation patterns?

Background
Existing brain imaging studies, investigating sexual arousal via the presentation of erotic pictures or film excerpts, have mainly used blocked designs with long stimulus presentation times.
Methods
To clarify how experimental functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) design affects stimulus-induced brain activity, we compared brief event-related presentation of erotic vs. neutral stimuli with blocked presentation in 10 male volunteers.
Results
Brain activation differed depending on design type in only 10% of the voxels showing task related brain activity. Differences between blocked and event-related stimulus presentation were found in occipitotemporal and temporal regions (Brodmann Area (BA) 19, 37, 48), parietal areas (BA 7, 40) and areas in the frontal lobe (BA 6, 44).
Conclusion
Our results suggest that event-related designs might be a potential alternative when the core interest is the detection of networks associated with immediate processing of erotic stimuli.
Additionally, blocked, compared to event-related, stimulus presentation allows the emergence and detection of non-specific secondary processes, such as sustained attention, motor imagery and inhibition of sexual arousal.

Full text

Visuo-auditory interactions in the primary visual cortex of the behaving monkey: Electrophysiological evidence

Background
Visual, tactile and auditory information is processed from the periphery to the cortical level through separate channels that target primary sensory cortices, from which it is further distributed to functionally specialized areas. Multisensory integration is classically assigned to higher hierarchical cortical areas, but there is growing electrophysiological evidence in man and monkey of multimodal interactions in areas thought to be unimodal, interactions that can occur at very short latencies. Such fast timing of multisensory interactions rules out the possibility of an origin in the polymodal areas mediated through back projections, but is rather in favor of heteromodal connections such as the direct projections observed in the monkey, from auditory areas (including the primary auditory cortex AI) directly to the primary visual cortex V1. Based on the existence of such AI to V1 projections, we looked for modulation of neuronal visual responses in V1 by an auditory stimulus in the awake behaving monkey.
Results
Behavioral or electrophysiological data were obtained from two behaving monkeys. One monkey was trained to maintain a passive central fixation while a peripheral visual (V) or visuo-auditory (AV) stimulus was presented. From a population of 45 V1 neurons, there was no difference in the mean latencies or strength of visual responses when comparing V and AV conditions. In a second active task, the monkey was required to orient his gaze toward the visual or visuo-auditory stimulus. From a population of 49 cells recorded during this saccadic task, we observed a significant reduction in response latencies in the visuo-auditory condition compared to the visual condition (mean 61.0 vs. 64.5 ms) only when the visual stimulus was at midlevel contrast. No effect was observed at high contrast.
Conclusion
Our data show that single neurons from a primary sensory cortex such as V1 can integrate sensory information of a different modality, a result that argues against a strict hierarchical model of multisensory integration. Multisensory interaction in V1 is, in our experiment, expressed by a significant reduction in visual response latencies specifically in suboptimal conditions and depending on the task demand. This suggests that neuronal mechanisms of multisensory integration are specific and adapted to the perceptual features of behavior.

Full text