A flurry of articles about Picower Institute’s Susumu Tonegawa’s paper implanting false memories in the mouse brain. They identified and tagged a memory engram for one environment, then activated that engram in a different environment while pairing it with shock. Later, the animals showed fear in the first environment as if they were shocked there.
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The journal Cortex will peer-review your experimental plan. If accepted, they agree to publish your results, regardless of how they turn out. But you must release your raw data so others can have at it.
Article in the Guardian -
Dave Eagleman spells it out for us.
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Discovery that some seizures arise in glial cells could offer new targets for epilepsy treatment. MIT News Release
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It was a good week for Miller Lab alumnus David J. Freedman (now a professor at University of Chicago).
Dave won the Distinguished Investigator Award in the Biological Sciences at The University of Chicago (http://www.freedmanlab.org/), was elected to the International Neuropsychological Symposium (INS History), and his band FuzZz had a CD release party.
When you’re hot, you’re hot.
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DIY attempts at electrical brain stimulation to improve cognition are to get easier. Nature editorial.
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Matt Chafee and crew show that monkeys under the influence of ketamine show similar deficits as human schizophrenia patients on a test of context processing.
Blackman et al 2013 -
It was recently reported that low-voltage, non-invasive brain stimulation improves mathematical abilities. Does it? Here’s a cautionary discussion:
Does Brain Stimulation Make You Better at Maths? -
For years, neurophysiologists have observed that many neurons in higher-level cortex have “weird” properties. They activate across a wide range of seemingly unrelated conditions and thus don’t seem to fit into the traditional view of brain function in which each neuron has a single function or message. They were often considered a “complicating nuisance” at best or dismissed at worst. It turns out that these mixed selectivity neurons may be the most critical for complex behavior and cognition. They greatly expand the brain’s computational power.
Read MIT press release: Complex brain function depends on flexibility
The paper:
Rigotti, M., Barak, O., Warden, M.R., Wang, X., Daw, N.D., Miller, E.K., & Fusi, S. (2013) The importance of mixed selectivity in complex cognitive tasks. Nature View PDF doi:10.1038/nature12160 -
In this week’s NY Times, Susana Martinez-Conde reminds us that our visual system works by detecting change.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/opinion/sunday/vision-is-all-about-change.html