Mammillary body

In the volumetric brain

The Territory

Structure. The mammillary bodies are the paired round bulges at the hypothalamus' posterior-inferior floor between the cerebral peduncles, each shell of cortex-like nuclei around a medial core; they receive the fornix columns and project via the mammillothalamic tract to the anterior thalamic nuclei.

Function. Diencephalic relay of the limbic memory loop: the Papez circuit's hypothalamic station. Their flagship pathology is Wernicke–Korsakoff disease — thiamine deficiency haemorrhages the mammillary bodies and periaqueductal grey, leaving dense anterograde amnesia with confabulation.

The Levers — graded instruments & the levers to come

Behaviour · Action · Thought — the tagged profile

The Network — what fires with this region

Papers on disk — 206 full texts

The Evidence — Neurosynth studies (709)

The Evidence — NeuroQuery studies (640)

The Exploration Guide

*Limbic lobe & medial ring · Mai atlas of record · 709 studies · 150 papers on disk*

The mammillary bodies are the paired round bulges on the hypothalamus' posterior floor — the Papez circuit's diencephalic relay, and the structure Wernicke–Korsakoff disease haemorrhages: thiamine deficiency's first casualty, anterograde amnesia's diencephalic station.

The Territory

The mammillary bodies are the paired round bulges at the hypothalamus' posterior-inferior floor between the cerebral peduncles, each shell of cortex-like nuclei around a medial core; they receive the fornix columns and project via the mammillothalamic tract to the anterior thalamic nuclei.

*— {'source': 'Mai, Majtanik & Paxinos', 'work': 'Atlas of the Human Brain, 4th ed., Academic Press/Elsevier', 'kind': 'atlas', 'locator': 'axial plates, MNI y −28.0…−2.0 mm, 6 plates (labels mb/mbodies)'}*

What It Does

Diencephalic relay of the limbic memory loop: the Papez circuit's hypothalamic station. Their flagship pathology is Wernicke–Korsakoff disease — thiamine deficiency haemorrhages the mammillary bodies and periaqueductal grey, leaving dense anterograde amnesia with confabulation.

The functional record: the limbic memory loop's hypothalamic station — mammillothalamic traffic to the anterior thalamic nuclei, the circuit's relay to cortical consolidation. The decoded profile is reward, midbrain, dopaminergic — the hypothalamic floor's motivational neighborhood. The graded matrix carries the emotional family: emotional-Stroop as stimulator and assessor, facial-emotion as stimulator — the medial temporal-adjacent affective records.

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

The Network

Red nucleus (979+645 shared studies), substantia nigra (914+591), midbrain (824) — the midbrain floor's motor-dopaminergic row, the mammillary bodies' downward gaze.

Co-activation partners of record: Red nucleus:979, Substantia nigra:914, Midbrain:824, Red nucleus:645, Substantia nigra:591, Amygdala:530, Superior colliculus:497, Cerebral aqueduct:481.

When It Fails

Wernicke–Korsakoff: thiamine deficiency haemorrhages the mammillary bodies — the amnestic syndrome's diencephalic signature, the record's flagship pathology stated as the record's own sentence.

The Evidence

• Role of the supplementary motor area and the right premotor cortex in the c (1997)
• Brain systems mediating aversive conditioning: an event-related fMRI study. (1998) — 10.1016/S0896-6273(00)80476-6
• An fMRI study of Stroop word-color interference: evidence for cingulate sub (1999) — 10.1016/S0006-3223(99)00056-6
• Characterizing the neural mechanisms of skill learning and repetition primi (2001) — 10.1093/brain/124.1.67
• Neural responses during anticipation of a primary taste reward. (2002) — 10.1016/S0896-6273(02)00603-7
• Integration of emotion and cognition in the lateral prefrontal cortex. (2002) — 10.1073/pnas.062381899

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

The Levers

• emotional-stroop — stimulator · standard-scientific
• emotional-stroop — assessor · standard-scientific
• facial-emotion — stimulator · standard-scientific
• facial-emotion — assessor · standard-scientific
• pain-induction — stimulator · standard-scientific
• pain-induction — assessor · standard-scientific

Candidate levers (Neurosynth-decoded terms — reward(method-other), pain(interoception), midbrain(anatomy-reference), amygdala(anatomy-reference), nucleus(anatomy-reference), striatum(method-other), responses(method-other), dopaminergic(drug-pharmacology) …) are the foundation for the thousands of instruments to come; they are ungraded by law.

Explore Further

Red nucleus:979, Substantia nigra:914, Midbrain:824, Red nucleus:645 — each name is a dossier stop in this explorer.

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