Northoff: CATATONIA: BBS Call for Commentators

Dear Dr. Qwerty, Below is a link to the forthcoming BBS target article WHAT CATATONIA CAN TELL US ABOUT "TOP-DOWN MODULATION": A NEUROPSYCHIATRIC HYPOTHESIS by George Northoff http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Northoff This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to nominate someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. A full electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the online BBSPrints Archive, at the URL that follows the abstract below. _____________________________________________________________ WHAT CATATONIA CAN TELL US ABOUT "TOP-DOWN MODULATION": A NEUROPSYCHIATRIC HYPOTHESIS George Northoff, MD PhD, PhD Harvard University Beth Israel Hospital Boston, Massachusetts KEYWORDS: Catatonia; Parkinson's disease; Top-down modulation; Bottom-up modulation; Horizontal modulation; Vertical modulation ABSTRACT: Differentialdiagnosis of motor symptoms, as for example akinesia, may be difficult in clinical neuropsychiatry. They may be either of neurologic origin, as for example Parkinson's disease, or psychiatric origin, as for example catatonia, leading to a so-called "conflict of paradigms". Despite their different origin symptoms may appear clinically more or less similar. Possibility of dissociation between origin and clinical appearance may reflect functional brain organisation in general and cortical-cortical/subcortical relations in particular. It is therefore hypothesized that similarities and differences between Parkinson's disease and catatonia may be accounted for by distinct kinds of modulation between cortico-cortical and cortico-subcortical relations. Comparison between Parkinson's disease and catatonia reveals distinction between two kinds of modulation "vertical and horizontal modulation". "Vertical modulation" concerns cortical-subcortical relations and allows apparently for bidirectional modulation. This is reflected in possibility of both "top-down and bottom-up modulation" and appearance of motor symptoms in both Parkinson's disease and catatonia. "Horizontal modulation" concerns cortical-cortical relations and allows apparently only for unidirectional modulation. This is reflected in one-way connections from prefrontal cortex to motor cortex and absence of major affective and behavioural symptoms in Parkinson's disease. It is concluded that comparison between Parkinson's disease and catatonia may reveal the nature of modulation of cortico-cortical and cortico-subcortical relations in further detail. http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Northoff ___________________________________________________________ Please do not prepare a commentary yet. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article. We will then let you know whether it was possible to include your name on the final formal list of invitees. _______________________________________________________________________ *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT *** (1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!). *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. If you do not wish to receive further Calls, please feel free to change your mailshot status through your User Login link on the BBSPrints homepage, using your username and password above: http://www.bbsonline.org/ *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Ralph BBS ------------------------------------------------------------------- Ralph DeMarco Associate Editorial Coordinator Behavioral and Brain Sciences Journals Department Cambridge University Press 40 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011-4211 UNITED STATES bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://bbsonline.org Tel: +001 212 924 3900 ext.374 Fax: +001 212 645 5960 -------------------------------------------------------------------