Abstract
Recent behavioral studies suggest that the thalamus plays a role in the higher level control of voluntary movement. Rats with large lesions of the medial thalamic nuclei were found to perform very poorly on a simple avoidance task requiring active movement. Control experiments indicated that the defect was not due to motor disability (in the sense of paralysis), lack of fear, or inability to learn the task. If the animals were given sufficient time, they would often respond, but only after a considerable delay. It was suggested that some structure in the medial thalamus forms part of a neural system which enables ideational processes to activate the motor system when a voluntary movement is made.<sup>1,2</sup>If this is so, one might
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