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Archive by tag | visual cortex

10 Aug 2012 | 12:18 BST

Too much of a good thing?

Posted by I-han Chou | Categories: I-han Chou, New in Nature

   … Read more

We published another double header yesterday, this time on the role of particular cell types in visual responses. Both studies describe the effect of optogenetically manipulating various interneuron classes in mouse visual cortex. The papers are Lee et al. from Yang Dan‘s lab and Wilson et al. from Mriganka Sur‘s labs. And in fact, both were preceded by Atallah et al. from Massimo Scanziani’s lab, which appeared in Neuron earlier this year. Which means a bonanza of data on the effects of activating parvalbumin-expressing interneurons, and also a bonanza of different conclusions about their exact role – everyone comes to slightly different conclusions.  Read more

Tags:

  • interneuron
  • Nature
  • neuroscience
  • optogenetics
  • parvalbumin
  • visual cortex

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13 Jul 2012 | 11:05 BST

A tale of three papers

Posted by I-han Chou | Categories: I-han Chou, New in Nature

From Figure 1, Li et al.

I wanted the title of this post to be “A tale of two one two three papers” but I couldn’t figure out how to get strikethroughs in the title field. And I thought “A tale of two, make that one, no make that two again, oops now three” might be a bit cumbersome. As promised, here’s another installment of the discussion of what happens when we receive conceptually related/overlapping papers. It starts with a paper that appeared just yesterday in Neuron by Kenichi Ohki and colleagues describing how mouse visual cortex neurons that developed from the same neural progenitor cell tend to be more similar functionally than those that did not.  Read more

Tags:

  • development
  • Nature
  • neuron
  • neuroscience
  • orientation selectivity
  • visual cortex

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22 Feb 2012 | 20:16 GMT

Layer magic and monkey business

Posted by I-han Chou | Categories: I-han Chou, New in Nature

Image from Wikipedia

We’ve known for over a century that sensory cortex is arranged in distinct layers, each containing a different make up of neuronal types and projection patterns, but we don’t actually know that much about the actual computations performed in each layer.  Today a paper from Massimo Scanziani’s lab takes a big step towards cracking the function of the bottom layer (layer 6) in mice. Layer 6 neurons project both to upper cortical layers and to the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus, which itself is the primary input to cortex, and so are primed to play a large modulatory role. Using a monumental combination of optogenetics, intracellular recording, and behavioral testing, the paper convincingly makes the case that layer 6 controls the gain of visual responses of upper layer neurons (i.e.  Read more

Tags:

  • Nature
  • neural circuits
  • neuroscience
  • optogenetics
  • primate research
  • visual cortex

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08 Feb 2012 | 12:10 GMT

Telepathy? I think not

Posted by I-han Chou | Categories: I-han Chou

From Supp Fig 10 of Kay et al.

There is just something about neural decoding that captures the imagination. Scientists “reading out brain activity” to infer what someone was seeing or doing sounds like the stuff of science fiction. But in practice, with the right dataset and right computer algorithm, it can be done – providing the question you are trying to query the brain is simple enough. But no matter how simple the question, with every paper comes an orgy of stories in the mainstream press about how scientists can eavesdrop on your thoughts or even engage in electronic telepathy. Thereby infuriating scientists and science journalists in droves, sometimes detracting from some very cool work.  Read more

Tags:

  • decoding
  • fMRI
  • Nature
  • neuroscience
  • visual cortex

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About this blog

Action Potential is a forum operated by neuroscience editors at Nature for the entire neuroscience community. We'll discuss what's new and exciting in science, be it in our journals or elsewhere, as well as science policy and publishing and provide updates from major meetings. Although we provide the opportunity to comment as a service to the community, we do not endorse all viewpoints represented here. To contact the contributors directly with confidential questions or suggestions for future entries, please e-mail n.gray@us.nature.com.
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