In the developing and adult brain the exact cellular proliferation, migration, and differentiation mechanisms of neural stem cells (NSCs) are of prime importance. Ionizing radiation (IR) affects neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, whic...

Binocular disparity is used for perception and action in three dimensions. Neurons in the primary visual cortex respond to binocular disparity in random dot patterns, even when the contrast is inverted between eyes (false depth cue). In contrast, neurons in the ventral stream largely cease to respond to false depth cues. This study evaluated whether GABAergic inhibition is involved in suppressing false depth cues in the human ventral visual cortex. We compared GABAergic inhibition (GABA+) and glutamatergic excitation (Glx) during the viewing of correlated and anticorrelated binocular disparity in 18 participants using single-voxel proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Measurements were taken from the early visual cortex (EVC) and the lateral occipital cortex (LO). Three visual conditions were presented per voxel location: correlated binocular disparity, anticorrelated binocular disparity, or a blank gray screen with a fixation cross. To identify differences in neurochemistry, GABA+ or Glx levels were com...

Few options exist for training arm movements in patients with severe chronic hemiparetic stroke who have very little active range of motion in their affected arm. Coupled bimanual training can prime the ipsilateral motor cortex for subsequent training w...

A pattern of electrical stimulation based on 2 prominent physiological features of the hippocampus, complex spike discharge and theta rhythm, was used to induce lasting increases in responses recorded in area CA1 of hippocampal slices maintained in vitro and from the hippocampus of behaving rats. This effect, termed primed burst (PB) potentiation, was elicited by as few as 3 stimuli delivered to the commissural/associational afferents to CA1. The patterns of stimulus presentation consisted of a single priming pulse followed either 140 or 170 msec later by a high-frequency burst of 2–10 pulses; control stimulation composed of unprimed high-frequency trains of up to 10 pulses had no enduring effect. Of all intervals tested, only 140 and 170 msec delays between the priming and burst stimuli were effective. PB potentiation could be induced both homo- and heterosynaptically. In the latter case, the priming pulse and burst stimuli were delivered to different dendritic fields; under these conditions, the PB effec...

Vicarious trial-and-error (VTE) in rodents occurs during deliberation between potential options and is associated with hippocampal activity. VTE is also associated with the use of spatial (e.g. allocentric, flexible) navigation strategies in rodents, an...

‘Parting is such sweet sorrow’. Sensory metaphors, particularly from the sense of taste, provide a rich vocabulary for describing emotional experience. This may be partly due to the common neural substrates shared by taste and emotion processing, such a...

Memory consolidation typically refers to stabilization of the encoded memory or offline gains in skill performance, a process which commonly requires hours or days from completion of training. However, recent evidence has shown that consolidation occurs...

There is a tight interplay between perception and action. Interacting with a dynamic world requires rapid integration of information from the environment that leads to the generation of movement. A prime example of perception-action coordination is the ...

Long-term synaptic plasticity is a prime candidate cellular substrate for learning and memory. It has been extensively studied in principal excitatory neuron networks but to a much lesser extent in inhibitory interneurons. In the hippocampal CA1 region,...

In the latest History of Neuroscience, 12 senior neuroscientists share their personal scientific journeys, from early childhood to the present day.