Oscillations and the basal ganglia: Motor control and beyond

By John-Stuart Brittain, Peter Brown. NeuroImage, 2013

375 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Oscillations form a ubiquitous feature of the central nervous system. Evidence is accruing from cortical and sub-cortical recordings that these rhythms may be functionally important, although the precise details of their roles remain unclear. The basal ganglia share this predilection for rhythmic activity which, as we see in Parkinson’s disease, becomes further enhanced in the dopamine depleted state. While certain cortical rhythms appear to penetrate the basal ganglia, others are transformed or blocked. Here, we discuss the functional association of oscillations in the basal ganglia and their relationship with cortical activity. We further explore the neural underpinnings of such oscillatory activity, including the important balance to be struck between facilitating information transmission and limiting information coding capacity. Finally, we introduce the notion that synchronised oscillatory activity can be broadly categorised as immutability promoting rhythms that reinforce incumbent processes, and mutability promoting rhythms that favour novel processing.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/21b91a13a0ebb0d25872619c2b72b0a6f866a52f

Citations in the corpus

• Human Beta Oscillations Reflect Magnitude and Fidelity of Priority Shifts in Working Memory (2026, unknown): “Given the role of beta in coor-dinating cortical-basal ganglia loops (Jenkinson and Brown, 2011; Brittain and Brown, 2014), which have been implicated in gating information in and out of WM (D ’ Ardenne et al., 2012; Chatham et al., 2014; Chatham and Badre, 2015), they may alternatively play a role…”