This issue of the Journal sees the publication of two papers that increase our knowledge of the functions of the internal architecture of the thalamus and globus pallidus—an important achievement given the existing literature on stereotactic functional surgery for Parkinson’s disease.

The paper by Caparros-Lefebvre et al 1 (pp 308–14) is fascinating, because one would have expected that after nearly 50 years of thalamic surgery every possible internal thalamic target would have been explored. However, the surgical outcomes have not always been studied carefully, or published for others to share. Caparros-Lefebvre et al compared the functional results …