THE ROLE OF BASAL GANGLIA IN EMOTIONAL AND COGNITIVE BEHAVIOR

The basal ganglia are a large collection of deep brain structure which form parallel and independent neuronal circuits with specific association, motor, and limbic frontal cerebral lobe areas, and some thalamic nuclei. Traditionally, the basal ganglia have been regarded as structures that regulate movements. Becouse of basal ganglia are damaged in Parkinson's and Huntington's disease, and it have been recognized primarily as a motor system disease, basal ganglia have been described predominantly as a component of motor systems. Basal ganglia have also significant function in procedural memory system, whih include learning new tasks and automatic selection of the situation, the learned patterns of action in planning future action, which is based on the balance (excitation and inhibition level) of bilateral corticobasal neural circuits Basal ganglia seem to play a far larger role than just their contribution to motor control and procedural learning and many of them functions are instead involved in cognitive and emotional behavior processing. In recent years, there has been an increasing evidence of cognitive and emotional disturbance that occur in basal ganglia diseases. Recently it have also demonstrated damage/dysfunction of basal ganglia and their connections to many other structures and particularly to the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system in certain psychiatric illnesses such as bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, addictive behavior, schizophrenia, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, Tourett disorder and apathy.