2015 APCENS
Asia-Pacific Conference on Engineering & Natural Sciences
July 29-31, 2015 at Okinawa, Japan

Keynote Speaker

Topic:
Some worries – or excitement – about how the basal ganglia system is –or is NOT - organized.

Abstract:
The organization of human movements is probably the most important function of the brain; think of which aspects of you life would continue without movement!Many movement disorders seem to have their origin in the basal ganglia – a system of deep brain nuclei below the cortex that seem to be damaged in many motor disorders.There is a powerful model of this system that has been growing in complexity since it was first described in 1988.This talk will pose the question – is it time to admit that the model is no longer true?I will discuss several results that are casting grave doubts on the basic assumptions of the model and on its usefulness in understanding Parkinson’s disease in particular.If we have time we will also explore some unpublished work that suggests that we have missed an important clue in the structure of the biggest nucleus of the basal ganglia; the striatum.Recent experiments suggest that there is a hidden substructure in this nucleus that communicates with its neighbors only via long loops including one that contacts the dopamine cells that are most vulnerable in Parkinson’s disease.