Interesting Journal Articles for the Week of 1/3/2022

Local feedback inhibition tightly controls rapid formation of hippocampal place fields

A look at the mechanics of the event boundary pre-print in the pre-print thread. It’s just amazing how these things are starting to dovetail, especially because these groups are disparate with no presumed knowledge of each others work. It’s really cool that the pieces of the elephant are starting to synchronize temporally as well as physically.

It appears that “great memory” may be in part a really sensitive event boundary mechanism in the CA1. One of the big issues with psychiatric descriptions is that they blur together several different physical mechanics based on external presentation, and this may be one of those instances. It seems likely that at least one type of “dementia” is caused by a degradation of this feedback loop which would create increasingly large ensembles. Because brains don’t understand time, temporal sorting would be taking place in increasingly large fields until the point when no new event boundaries could be created.

How do we test this in healthy individuals?

Local feedback inhibition tightly controls rapid formation of hippocampal place fields

I wonder what they are picking up. Does ventral context loading really start this fast? Not sure why this is ringing bells, but it’s an interesting result.

Economic Choices under Simultaneous or Sequential Offers Rely on the Same Neural Circuit

Wait until they discover that it’s actually a continuous stream that gets broken up.

Transcriptomic taxonomy and neurogenic trajectories of adult human, macaque, and pig hippocampal and entorhinal cells

Shots fired! So what’s the deal, are humans born with a set amount of index cells and that’s it? Are new cells restricted to the brain stem or cerebellum? Is there something they missed that I’m missing as well?

A novel reticular node in the brainstem synchronizes neonatal mouse crying with breathing

Certain phenotypes of “autism”, tourettes, certain phenotypes of “OCD” are brainstem “conditions”. There’s a pretty good chance that all “conditions” with autonomic/repetitive properties are artifacts of brainstem function. Oh, the part about speech and “sounds” being the same is interesting too.

Contextual features in the developing hippocampus: A representational similarity analysis

The hippocampal transform, Dorsal side tracking external/environmental/stimuli, ventral side tracking context. The interesting implication with this study is that perhaps these aren’t fixed, we can actually train our ventral streams to route more stimuli dependent information and our dorsal streams to process more context. Studies like this are kind of compelling me to look a lot harder at optimal early developmental options.

It’s actually getting kind of weird how consistent this dorsal/ventral mechanic is. I’ve been actively looking for research that shows functional heterogeneity between them (referred to as “anterior and posterior” in this study), there seems to be a pretty resoundingly clear separation of function. Because the overwhelming amount of research in brains focuses on cerebral function, we’ve only been looking at the dorsal stream. I’m beginning to wonder, did increased awareness of the ventral stream lead to better imaging of the cerebellum, or did increased imaging of the cerebellum lead to additional awareness of the ventral stream (outside of the visual/audio domain).

All this time we’ve been missing literally half the functionality, and even that is likely to be reduced once we get a better grip on brainstem contributions. We’ve been under the assumption that we were looking at “whole brain” function and making assertions based on that, when in reality we were seeing less than 50% at best. We still have a lot to learn about learning.

Sub- and Supra-Second Timing in Auditory Perception: Evidence for Cross-Domain Relationships

Whoa! This is one of the most unique views of dorsal vs. ventral cognitive differences I’ve seen!

Distinct Roles for Prefrontal Dopamine D1 and D2 Neurons in Social Hierarchy

It’s pretty clear that most social organisms have a biologically imparted hierarchical sorting mechanism, but the mechanics of that programming were unclear. My assumption was that these types of behaviors are coded into the mammillary complex and/or brainstem areas. This provides an interesting look at this, suggesting it might actually a computation of both paths (which seems consistent).

Mapping organelle supply chains

Let’s talk about tau tangles.

Spatial goal coding in the hippocampal formation

What is the “purpose” of the hippocampal transform?

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