Cerebral aqueduct

In the volumetric brain

The Territory

Structure. The cerebral aqueduct (of Sylvius) is the narrow channel through the midbrain's tegmentum, running from the third ventricle's posterior end beneath the periaqueductal grey to the fourth ventricle — about 1.5 cm long, the ventricular system's narrowest point.

Function. The system's bottleneck: aqueductal stenosis (congenital, post-haemorrhagic, tumour) dams the third and lateral ventricles while sparing the fourth — the classic non-communicating hydrocephalus; the surrounding periaqueductal grey is the central pain-modulation field (stimulation analgesia lives here).

The Levers — graded instruments & the levers to come

Behaviour · Action · Thought — the tagged profile

The Network — what fires with this region

Papers on disk — 240 full texts

The Evidence — Neurosynth studies (933)

The Evidence — NeuroQuery studies (883)

The Exploration Guide

*Brainstem · Mai atlas of record · 933 studies · 171 papers on disk*

The cerebral aqueduct of Sylvius is a narrow channel barely a millimetre wide through the midbrain — the entire brain's cerebrospinal highway compressed into one bottleneck, whose blockage is the classic non-communicating hydrocephalus.

The Territory

The cerebral aqueduct (of Sylvius) is the narrow channel through the midbrain's tegmentum, running from the third ventricle's posterior end beneath the periaqueductal grey to the fourth ventricle — about 1.5 cm long, the ventricular system's narrowest point.

*— {'source': 'Naidich, Duvernoy, Delman, Sorensen, Kollias & Haacke', 'work': "Duvernoy's Atlas of the Human Brain Stem and Cerebellum: High-Field MRI, Springer", 'kind': 'atlas', 'locator': 'midbrain, aqueduct'}*

What It Does

The system's bottleneck: aqueductal stenosis (congenital, post-haemorrhagic, tumour) dams the third and lateral ventricles while sparing the fourth — the classic non-communicating hydrocephalus; the surrounding periaqueductal grey is the central pain-modulation field (stimulation analgesia lives here).

The functional record: aqueductal stenosis (congenital, post-haemorrhagic, tumour) dams the third and lateral ventricles while sparing the fourth. Its decoded profile is unexpected and real: pain, fear, emotion, threat — the periaqueductal grey wrapped around this channel is the descending pain-modulation headquarters, and the literature around the aqueduct is PAG literature. No graded instrument is assigned; the structure's physiology is its neighbours'.

*— {'source': 'Josephine C. Moore', 'work': 'Brain Atlas and Functional Systems', 'kind': 'atlas', 'locator': 'ventricular system and CSF'}*

The Network

Midbrain (1,050 shared studies), superior colliculus (797), red nucleus (717+709), substantia nigra (614) — the midbrain's command row, lined along the aqueduct.

Co-activation partners of record: Midbrain:1050, Superior colliculus:797, Red nucleus:717, Red nucleus:709, Substantia nigra:614, Substantia nigra:605, Thalamus:560, Thalamus:534.

When It Fails

Aqueductal stenosis: the dam and its drowned ventricles. The PAG's pain-modulation failure-modes (and the periaqueductal stimulation surgeries that exploit it) belong to this channel's walls.

Its decoded profile reads like a midbrain census because the aqueduct's walls are the midbrain's grey: every pain, fear and threat paper in its dossier is periaqueductal grey literature wearing the aqueduct's address.

The Evidence

• Anatomy of motor learning. I. Frontal cortex and attention to action. (1997)
• Pattern of neuronal activity associated with conscious and unconscious proc (1997)
• Role of the supplementary motor area and the right premotor cortex in the c (1997)
• Neural systems underlying learning and representation of global motion. (1998) — 10.1073/pnas.95.21.12657
• An fMRI study of Stroop word-color interference: evidence for cingulate sub (1999) — 10.1016/S0006-3223(99)00056-6
• Inaudible high-frequency sounds affect brain activity: hypersonic effect. (2000)

933 studies total touch this region in the Neurosynth corpus of record; the full literature lives beside this dossier.

The Levers

• No graded instrument touches this region yet — the lever family for this structure is an open slot in the matrix; the tagged profile names its candidates.

Candidate levers (Neurosynth-decoded terms — pain(interoception), reward(method-other), fear(emotion), midbrain(anatomy-reference), emotional(emotion), thalamus(method-other), threat(method-other), emotion(emotion) …) are the foundation for the thousands of instruments to come; they are ungraded by law.

Explore Further

Midbrain:1050, Superior colliculus:797, Red nucleus:717, Red nucleus:709 — each name is a dossier stop in this explorer.

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