the hypothalamus controls the pituitary gland and that's both the anterior and the posterior
pituitary gland and it's a region of the brain that we call neuro endocrine because it's neurons
and it's hormones we'll talk a lot more about the hormonal aspects of the pituitary gland and the
hypothalamus in the endocrine in the endocrinology series of lectures but what I want you to know
for this neuro part is that it secretes factors releasing factors that go from the hypothalamus
through blood capillaries into the anterior pituitary and cause the release of hormones from
the pituitary that go into circulation and affect the endocrine organs so releasing factors in the
hypothalamus stimulating factors in the anterior pituitary and then actions on the endocrine glands
without throughout the rest of the body it also produces two important hormones oxytocin
and vasopressin and they are actually made in what are called neurosecretory neurosecretory
neurons within the hypothalamus itself the axons of those hypothalamic neurons go through the
pituitary stalk to the posterior pituitary and release their hormones into circulation within
the posterior pituitary and again when we hit the endocrinology section of the MOOC we'll
talk a lot more about the endocrine system as I mentioned before the autonomics are controlled
by your hypothalamus so again sympathetics our fight-or-flight parasympathetics rest and
digest the main control center for both of those systems is in the hypothalamus so the hypothalamus
gets information from your frontal lobe from your thalamus which is integrating sensory information
from your cortex and sensory information coming up from the brainstem and it coordinates it all
to then come up with whether you should be having a parasympathetic or a sympathetic response to
what's going on in your internal and external environment and so it puts all that information
together and then sends it back down to either the brain stem or the spinal cord and activates
your parasympathetics or your sympathetics it has important connections to the amygdala and
the thalamus and we'll talk about the amygdala in a separate lecture a little bit later so what
I want you to know for this again is that the autonomic nervous system is controlled by the
hypothalamus and then there's all these other behaviors I mentioned that the hypothalamus is
important for survival of you and of your species so mating behaviors parenting behaviors hunger
thirst controlling your body temperature circadian rhythms so the retina actually sends information
directly to the hypothalamus it has nothing to do with seeing but it has everything to do with
whether it's dark or light outside all of these behaviors are regulated by your hypothalamus now
in humans it gets a lot more complicated because we don't simply run on our hypothalamus otherwise
we just well we'd be kind of like rodents and a lot of these symptoms sis systems have been
worked out in rodents and so we know what if we stimulate this part of the hypothalamus or we
knock out this part we get these real specific behaviors humans have thank goodness this big
neocortex that goes over the top of our brain and pretty much can override the hypothalamus
for most of the time until you get really really hungry or really really thirsty and then you might
kind of give in to those basic drives but this is the kind of stuff that's running underneath
the surface of a lot of your more complicated behaviors and so your diencephalon and your
hypothalamus is responsible for keeping you alive and for keeping our species alive and all the
other species have a hypothalamus so in summary what do I want you to know about the diencephalon
what are its subdivisions and name three of the functional systems that are associated with the
thalamus name the specific sensory divisions of the thalamus and their modalities what are the
main functions of the hypothalamus and be able to give an example of one or two of these functions
if you have a grasp on these main func these main concepts then you're ready for the assessment