Neural Progenitor Cells (NPCs) are generated from a pool of neuroepithelial cells that begin to transition into Radial Glial Cells (RGC). These cells, in partially overlapped waves, first producing several self-amplifying symmetric divisions and then RG...

Read science policy and advocacy news from the week of March 17, 2017

As you read these words, light is striking your retinas, triggering chemical and electrical cascades. For the information contained within these wavelengths to be of use to you, your brain must encode, process, and transform it into more abstract representations ([Treisman, 1986][1]). Importantly,

Sleep consists of two alternating states—rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM (NREM) sleep. Neurons adjust their firing activity based on brain state, however, the extent to which this modulation varies across neurons and brain regions remains poorly understood. This study analyzed previously acquired 17-h continuous recordings of single-unit activity and local field potentials in the ventral hippocampal CA1 region, prelimbic cortex layer 5, and basolateral nucleus of the amygdala of fear-conditioned rats. The findings indicate that more than half of the neurons fired faster during REM sleep than during NREM sleep, although a notable subset of neurons exhibited the opposite preference, firing preferentially during NREM sleep. During sleep, the overall firing activity of both REM- and NREM-preferring neurons decreased. However, fast network oscillations, including hippocampal sharp-wave ripples (SWRs), amygdalar high-frequency oscillations, cortical ripples, and cortical spindles, differentially modulated R...

Fentanyl is frequently used during cardiovascular surgery to induce hemodynamic stability, beneficial for creating a clear operating plane. We retrospectively analyzed the frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) data from patients (n=6) at the Massachusetts ...

While SfN's member newsletter dates back to the birth of the Society, Neuroscience Quarterly has reached an important milestone this year: transitioning to a digital format that offers exciting new opportunities for enhanced content.

SfN’s journals, eNeuro and JNeurosci, continue to provide the Society’s members and the field with two great options for publishing research.

Recent fMRI studies reported transformed representations between perception and visual working memory (VWM) in human early visual cortex (EVC). This is inconsistent with the still widely cited original proposal of the sensory account of VWM, which argues for a shared perception-VWM representation based on successful cross-decoding of the two representations. Although cross-decoding was usually lower than within-VWM decoding and consistent with transformed VWM representations, this has been attributed to experimental differences between perceptual and VWM tasks: once they are equated, the same representation is expected to exist in both. Including human participants of both sexes, this study compared target and distractor representations during the same VWM delay period for the same objects, thereby equating experimental differences. Even with strong VWM representations present throughout occipitotemporal cortex (OTC, including EVC) and posterior parietal cortex (PPC), fMRI cross-decoding revealed significa...

SfN members in New York City coordinated a series of eight in-district meetings with both Republican and Democratic members of Congress.

Read science policy and advocacy news from the week of June 9, 2017.