The Basal Ganglia and Their Relation to Movement.

Abstract

Persons practicing medicine in sheltered specialties may forget the many disorders of the basal ganglia in addition to classical parkinsonism which disrupt the orderly pattern of everyday existence. They make martyrs of their victims who eke out a miserable life of torment forever twitching, turning, or grimacing, agitated by tremor or hemiballismus or the oculogyric crisis of postencephalitic parkinsonism. So complex are the functionings of the central nervous system that when the orderly neuromotor activities of normal people go awry it is not always clear whether it occurs because some disruptive and repetitive stimulation keeps firing an active part of the central nervous system or whether some pathway through which the messages are relayed has become diseased. The brakes may be off or the accelerator stuck on the floorboard. The many actions of the central nervous system we see as motion are the final resultant, the algebraic balance of electrical