Red nucleus

In the volumetric brain

The Territory

Structure. The red nucleus is the round pink-tinted (iron-rich) nuclear egg in the midbrain's tegmentum at the level of the third-nerve nucleus, divided into a caudal magnocellular (large-neuron) and rostral parvocellular part; superior cerebellar peduncle fibres decussate through and around it.

Function. The rubrospinal origin: in humans the magnocellular rubrospinal projection is vestigial relative to corticospinal dominance, while the parvocellular part feeds the inferior-olive–cerebellar loop — red-nucleus lesions contribute to tremor and ataxic syndromes (Benedikt's syndrome when third-nerve fibres are caught).

The Levers — graded instruments & the levers to come

Behaviour · Action · Thought — the tagged profile

The Network — what fires with this region

Papers on disk — 213 full texts

The Evidence — Neurosynth studies (892)

The Evidence — NeuroQuery studies (800)

The Exploration Guide

*Brainstem · Mai atlas of record · 892 studies · 150 papers on disk*

The right red nucleus — the mirror egg. Its decoded profile adds striatal and response vocabulary: the red nucleus sits between the nigra's dopamine, the aqueduct's defence circuitry and the thalamus, and its literature is borrowed from all three.

The Territory

The red nucleus is the round pink-tinted (iron-rich) nuclear egg in the midbrain's tegmentum at the level of the third-nerve nucleus, divided into a caudal magnocellular (large-neuron) and rostral parvocellular part; superior cerebellar peduncle fibres decussate through and around it.

*— {'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, tegmentum'}*

What It Does

The rubrospinal origin: in humans the magnocellular rubrospinal projection is vestigial relative to corticospinal dominance, while the parvocellular part feeds the inferior-olive–cerebellar loop — red-nucleus lesions contribute to tremor and ataxic syndromes (Benedikt's syndrome when third-nerve fibres are caught).

The functional record mirrors the left's: vestigial magnocellular rubrospinal projection, living parvocellular cerebellar loop. No graded instrument is assigned; its 150-paper dossier is the midbrain row's literature, not its own.

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

The Network

Substantia nigra (1,013 shared studies), midbrain (989), the mirror nucleus (788), cerebral aqueduct (779), superior colliculus (769) — the tegmental row again, mirrored.

Co-activation partners of record: Substantia nigra:1013, Midbrain:989, Red nucleus:788, Cerebral aqueduct:779, Superior colliculus:769, Substantia nigra:638, Thalamus:607, Thalamus:575.

When It Fails

Holmes tremor's mirror. The red nucleus's dossiers are the atlas's paired study in how a once-dominant motor nucleus becomes a relay with a tremor named after it.

The mirror nucleus's reward and anticipation terms are the nigro-rubral neighbourhood's: the red nucleus sits between the nigra's dopamine forecasts and the aqueduct's defence cascade, and the midbrain-imaging literature cites it from both sides. Its own dedicated literature is the comparative anatomy of a nucleus losing its motor primacy — the transition story is the guide.

The Evidence

• Pattern of neuronal activity associated with conscious and unconscious proc (1997)
• Brain systems mediating aversive conditioning: an event-related fMRI study. (1998) — 10.1016/S0896-6273(00)80476-6
• Activation of Heschl's gyrus during auditory hallucinations. (1999) — 10.1016/S0896-6273(00)80715-1
• Recollection and familiarity in recognition memory: an event-related functi (1999)
• An fMRI study of Stroop word-color interference: evidence for cingulate sub (1999) — 10.1016/S0006-3223(99)00056-6
• Orienting attention in time: behavioural and neuroanatomical distinction be (2000) — 10.1016/S0028-3932(99)00132-3

892 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 — its lever candidates are named in the tagged profile; the grading is the campaign to come.

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

Explore Further

Substantia nigra:1013, Midbrain:989, Red nucleus:788, Cerebral aqueduct:779 — each name is a dossier stop in this explorer.

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