Section: New Results

The thalamus is more than a relay

Many recent results in neuroscience indicate that the role of the thalamus in the brain is certainly more important than it used to be considered, particularly concerning its relation with the cortex. Interestingly, we considered this question as a side effect of our work in the Keops project (cf. §  8.1 ) with our chilean neuroscientist colleagues studying non standard ganglion cells in the retina. Our modeling [6] and bibliographic studies led us to propose a biologically-founded algorithm [13] for the interplay between the modulatory and driving connections between the thalamus and the cortex, in the case of the projection of these ganglion cells on the thalamus [14] . This study has been carried out with the strong constraint of proposing a system working on a real visual flow. In the near future, we aim at developing this original view of the thalamus in the more general case of its pulvinar associative nucleus, learning to route to the cortex multimodal information flows.