“We have enlightened every neuron of the brain as if it were a Christmas tree.” This describes the neuroscientist Alexandre Pouget the complete map of the neuronal activity presented this Wednesday, which shows that the brain acts as a whole in decision making and that the previous expectations are important.
This researcher at the University of Geneva and his laboratory developed, along with other European and American research teams, a detailed map at the cellular level of what is the decision -making throughout the brain of a mouse. Its results are collected in two articles in Nature magazine.
The scientists of the International Brain Laboratory Consortium (IBL) mapped the activity of more than 650,000 individual rodent neurons during a decision -making process, covering 279 areas of the brain, which together represent 95% of the brain volume of this animal, widely used in neurological research due to its similarity with humans.
The task they exposed to the mice consisted of placing them in front of a screen in which a light appeared on the left or right side. The animal had to move a small wheel in the right direction towards which the light came out to receive a reward.
On some occasions, the researchers put such a dim light on the screen that the mouse almost had to guess in which direction the wheel. In those cases they saw that the rodents were guided by their previous knowledge of the frequency with which the light had appeared to the left or the right to make a decision.
This assumption of mice allowed researchers to study how previous expectations influence perception and decision making.
Constant communication
The first study, entitled “A map of neuronal activity throughout the brain during complex behaviors,” corroborated that decision -making signals are distributed throughout the brain and are not located in specific regions, while in information processing the areas are more delimited.
In this line, the study questions the traditional hierarchical model of brain function and demonstrates that there is constant communication between areas of the brain during decision making, the beginning of the action to carry them out and even the reward.
In short, that the brain works more as a whole than parcely when it comes to generating complex behaviors, which implies that neuroscientifics will have to adopt a more global approach in the study of the brain.
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The brain, a prediction machine
The second investigation, representations throughout the brain of previous information!, Confirmed that previous expectations or beliefs about what is likely to happen based on recent experience are coded throughout the brain and not only in cognitive areas, as thought so far.
Thus, expectations are created even in early sensory areas such as the thalamus, the first brain filter for visual information from the eye.
This finding, in the opinion of the researchers, that the brain acts as a prediction machine, with expectations encoded in different brain regions that play a central role in the orientation of behavioral responses.
Researchers suggest that this last discovery will have implications for the understanding of conditions such as schizophrenia and autism, which are believed to be caused by the different ways in which expectations are updated in the brain.
The data of these studies, together with the protocols used to collect them, will be open available to the scientific community for later analysis and research.
Looking ahead, the IBL team plans to expand its initial approach to decision -making to continue making progress in neuroscience.
Another American research macroproject, Brain.
One of Brain’s scientific leaders, the Spanish Rafael Yuste, director of the Neurotechnology Center of Columbia University in New York, points out that the finding known today “are an important advance in the application to animals of a technology that begins to be used in patients.”
“This work has also been carried out by a great laboratory consortium, demonstrating that modern neuroscience, and in general all biology, is becoming more and more to physics, where great experiments are done in a group,” he adds in a reaction collected by Science Media Center Spain.
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With EFE information
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