Travel Awards for FENS Forum.

Travel Awards for FENS Forum.

In 1981, I published a paper in the first issue of the Journal of Neuroscience with my postdoctoral mentor, Dr. Richard Bunge. At that time, the long-standing belief that each neuron expressed only one neurotransmitter, known as Dale’s Principle (Dale, 1935), was being hotly debated following a report by French embryologist Nicole Le Douarin showing that neural crest cells destined for one transmitter phenotype could express characteristics of another if transplanted to alternate sites in the developing embryo (LeDouarin, 1980). In the Bunge lab, we were able to more directly test the question of phenotypic plasticity in the controlled environment of the tissue culture dish. Thus, in our paper, we grew autonomic catecholaminergic neurons in culture under conditions which promoted the acquisition of cholinergic traits and showed that cells did not abandon their inherited phenotype in order to adopt a new one but instead were capable of dual transmitter expression. In this Progressions article, I detail the ...

Individuals with normal hearing exhibit considerable variability in their capacity to understand speech in noisy environments. Previous research suggests the cause of this variance may be due to individual differences in cognition and auditory perception. To investigate the impact of cognitive and perceptual differences on speech comprehension, 25 adult human participants with normal hearing completed numerous cognitive and psychoacoustic tasks including the Flanker, Stroop, Trail Making, reading span, and temporal fine structure tests. They also completed a continuous multitalker spatial attention task while neural activity was recorded using electroencephalography. The auditory cortical N1 response was extracted as a measure of neural speech encoding during continuous speech listening using an engineered “chirped-speech” (Cheech) stimulus. We compared N1 component morphologies of target and masker speech stimuli to assess neural correlates of attentional gains while listening to concurrently played short...

Background. Nearly all applications of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) begin by assessing the resting motor threshold (RMT). Conventionally defined as the minimum TMS intensity needed to elicit a positive motor response 50% of the time, the RMT ...

Adolescents and young adults of the 1960’s and 70’s, a time during which cannabis (CB) use expanded rapidly, are now entering their senior years when age-related cognitive decline may begin. There is growing evidence of the adverse effects of CB use on ...

Read science policy and advocacy news from the week of February 24, 2017

Check out these newsworthy studies from the September 21, 2016, issue of JNeurosci. Media interested in obtaining the full text of the studies should contact media@sfn.org.

In collaboration with the American Brain Coalition, BrainFacts.org presents "The Neuroscience of Pain: Translating Science to the Patient" webinar. Tune in to the live webinar on February 4.

Mice lacking the gene Shank3 display structural and functional deficits in the prefrontal cortex, finds a study published in JNeurosci.