How to Use thalamus in a Sentence

thalamus

noun
  • The thalamus sends fibers to the area of the cortex where sounds are processed.
    — Mo Costandi, Scientific American, 29 June 2017
  • Smell is the only sense that doesn’t pass through the thalamus before reaching the forebrain.
    — Carl Engelking, Discover Magazine, 21 Dec. 2022
  • The thalamus is about the size and shape of a quail egg and sits deep in the brain, relaying info all around the cortex.
    — Max G. Levy, Wired, 11 May 2021
  • These areas wake up the thalamus, which projects the instructions to the cortex.
    — Yasemin Saplakoglu, Quanta Magazine, 17 Oct. 2025
  • The thalamus may not be involved in the same manner for both types of information.
    — Jackie Wattles, CNN, 31 Mar. 2023
  • And that consciousness is known to be linked to the activity of structures such as the brain stem and thalamus.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 4 Oct. 2019
  • In this way, smell is totally unique from all other senses, which pass first through the thalamus, a sort of relay station of the brain.
    — NBC News, 30 Oct. 2017
  • The thalamus, on the other hand, didn’t change for another 15 minutes.
    — Carl Zimmer, Discover Magazine, 25 Mar. 2019
  • Nearby brain regions such as the thalamus, which relays information from your senses to the rest of your brain, shut off first.
    — Yasemin Saplakoglu, Quanta Magazine, 17 Oct. 2025
  • The thalamus is often described as the brain's switchboard, relaying signals from one region to the next.
    — Michael Nedelman, CNN, 19 Sep. 2017
  • Schiff wondered if stimulating the thalamus could restore some of its function.
    — Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, 16 May 2025
  • In Dobbyn’s case, the target is a little area of tissue about the size of a pencil eraser deep in a brain region known as the thalamus.
    — NBC News, 11 Feb. 2018
  • Unlike our other senses, smell doesn’t first pass through the relay center of our brain’s thalamus to be routed through to the language-rich cortex.
    — Noy Thrupkaew, Washington Post, 21 Apr. 2021
  • In people with that condition, the structure and function of the thalamus can be different from what is typical.
    — Anil Ananthaswamy, Washington Post, 28 May 2017
  • The stimulation of the vagus nerve could in effect be giving the thalamus a volume boost in the brain, reports Price.
    — Ben Panko, Smithsonian, 28 Sep. 2017
  • Mice who had stem cells injected into their thalamus were healthier than average mice and lived 10% longer.
    — Sophie Weiner, Popular Mechanics, 4 Nov. 2017
  • Connections between the thalamus and cortex have long been implicated in autism.
    — Aamir Khollam, Interesting Engineering, 1 Sep. 2025
  • In plain terms, most sensory information stops at the thalamus a kind of switchboard before being routed to other parts of the brain.
    — Lauren Jarvis-Gibson, Charlotte Observer, 16 June 2026
  • Likewise, the neocortex (which governs things like movement and language) and the thalamus (close to the brain’s center) emit more prolonged waves—known as slow waves.
    — WIRED, 14 June 2023
  • Previous studies have shown a connection between the structure and function of the thalamus and dyslexia.
    — Erin Blakemore, Smithsonian, 25 May 2017
  • Specialists found an artery in his brain had burst, damaging the left side of the thalamus, which determines the meaning of signals and routes them to other areas in the brain.
    — Tom Hallman Jr., OregonLive.com, 13 Oct. 2017
  • Smells bypass the thalamus, traveling straight from the nose to the olfactory bulbs located behind the spot where eyeglasses rest on your face.
    — Wired, 2 Aug. 2022
  • Every little image, sound, or physical sensation that reminded him of the crash could trigger this thalamus outage.
    — Maddie Bender, Men's Health, 4 Oct. 2022
  • In Tourette’s patients, there’s abnormal activity in a part called the medial thalamus.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 26 June 2017
  • Normally, pain signals begin somewhere in the body and work their way to the thalamus, deep in the brain, and then to the prefrontal cortex, producing conscious perception of pain.
    — Erik Vance, Discover Magazine, 19 July 2014
  • As the name implies, the circuit connects structures deep in the brain—the basal ganglia, which includes the striatum, and the thalamus—with areas in the cortex closer to the brain’s surface.
    — Lydia Denworth, Scientific American, 1 Aug. 2021
  • These memories are created and stored through a complex network that connects the frontal lobes, temporal lobes, and a region deep in the brain known as the anterior thalamus.
    — Shane O'Mara, Foreign Affairs, 15 Jan. 2016
  • Miller and Brown suspected that the thalamus would be especially important for reinstating the rich chaos of being awake.
    — Max G. Levy, Wired, 11 May 2021
  • Their presence indicates that connections between the thalamus and cortex — two key parts of the brain necessary for consciousness — are intact and working.
    — Paul Smaglik, Discover Magazine, 4 Mar. 2025
  • These new results suggest that learning to read changes the way the thalamus connects to the rest of the brain, and that in turn could help scientists figure out if disruptions in these connections could cause dyslexia.
    — Erin Blakemore, Smithsonian, 25 May 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'thalamus.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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