 There everybody Dr. O here and this way we're going to dive a little deeper into the thalamus. Remember the thalamus is part of the diencephalon. We have the thalamus, the hypothalamus, which we'll cover in the next video and the epithalamus and then the posterior part of the epithalamus is where the pineal or pineal gland is that produces melatonin. We cover that in AMP2. Let's talk about the thalamus. In a word, the thalamus is a filter. That's the main thing I want you to think of, but I do want to tie it tied to some more functions here. So it's a, it is a filter, so it filters all the ascending sensory information that travels to your primary sensory cortex and tells you what you need to feel. So think about everything you're aware of right now that or everything that's happening to you right now that your body's aware of, but it's not reaching your consciousness. The thalamus is filtering that out. So I always think about like Superman, like Superman could hear and see everything and he had to learn how to filter that out. Well, imagine if every sensation, every possible stimulus that's affecting you right now was being sent to your brain. It would be completely overlaid, overloaded. Your hard drive would crash, your internet would go down, whatever analogy you want to use. So the thalamus is going to filter out like 99% of that information. I always think about like socks, right? You put your socks on the morning and you feel them, then your thalamus is like, you know what? It doesn't matter. I don't, I don't, I need to make my, the cerebrum aware of really important stuff. I shouldn't feel those socks the same way all day. Now, now that I'm talking about my socks, I can feel them, but I generally don't sit there thinking about feeling my socks all day long. The thing ring, when I first started to wear it, like I constantly felt it, it was weird, right? Then you just get used to it. So your thalamus is filtering out all the stuff that it doesn't think your cerebrum needs to be bothered with. That's the simplest way to look at it. Even like vision, right? I see what I'm staring at. I don't see, I'm not aware, as aware of the things that are often the periphery. There's been so many examples of things that you, that get cut out by the thalamus. Now what's kind of interesting, the only sensation that doesn't travel through the thalamus is smell, which means you really can't not smell something. You can get used to smelling things because of different levels of adaptation. But your brain can't filter smells the same way it filters other sensations. Okay. So we do have a left and a right thalamus, the third ventricles sitting between them. And inside each thalamus, we have these thalamic nuclei. The nuclei would be the clusters of information processing centers. So let's go through them. So the first, we have the anterior group. And that's going to, inside of that is these anterior nuclei. I don't really care about the names of the nuclei, but part, this is part of the limbic system. So it's involved with emotion. We'll cover the limbic system later, limbic system in a separate video. But the thalamus is a key part of the limbic system. Then we have the medial group. That's going to be awareness of these emotional states is going to come from the, from the medial group in the thalamus. The ventral group is going to be one of the relay centers. So it relays sensory information. The posterior group is going to be where visual and auditory information is going to be received and then relayed on to other parts of the, of the cerebrum in your basal nuclei. Then the lateral group plays a role in emotional states and integrating and using sensory information. So a lot of big words there, I guess, but in the end, just remember filter and relay center. Those are going to be the key things, but don't forget that thalamus is part of the limbic system. So it does play a role in emotion and emotional states. Okay, that's the thalamus. I hope this helps. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.