Topic: auditory thalamus

Cholinergic activity is thought to play an important role in learning and the control of brain state. Multiple studies have shown that pairing external phasic stimulation of the cholinergic basal forebrain (CBF) with a sensory stimulus drives long-lasting sensory cortical plasticity, implicating the CBF as a potential substrate for associative learning. For this to be ecologically valid, we hypothesized that CBF projections to the sensory cortex should exhibit phasic signaling that is temporally-synchronous with sensory-evoked responses in cortical neurons. Intrinsic sensory-evoked responses h

Down syndrome (DS) results from chromosome 21 trisomy, causing cognitive and developmental challenges often accompanied by hearing deficits. Studies on humans using EEG and MEG have identified prolonged latencies in sound-evoked responses in DS. However, the origin and characteristics of these deficits remain unclear. This study investigates auditory processing in a DS rat model to determine whether sensory deficits arise from early processing areas, such as the auditory thalamus and primary auditory cortex (A1), or higher-level cognitive alterations. We conducted neural activity recordings, u

The posterior most region of the striatum receives dense innervation from sensory brain regions and has been demonstrated to play a role in behaviors that require sensorimotor integration including discrimination, avoidance and defense​ responses. The output neurons of the striatum, the D1 and D2 striatal projection neurons (SPNs) that make up the direct and indirect pathways, respectively, are thought to play differential roles in these behavioral responses, although it remains unclear if or how these neurons display differential responsivity to sensory stimuli. Here, we use whole cell membra

The giant synaptic terminals play an important role transmitting information with exquisite precision and speed. The thalamus, an important center for the integration and relay of sensory information, is the brain region innervated by more giant terminals. These giant terminals act like drivers, delivering primary sensory information from the somatosensory, visual and auditory pathways. In the auditory thalamus, the drivers arise from the inferior colliculus. Surprisingly, we have observed a population of giant synaptic terminals in the auditory thalamus arising from the medial superior olive