Topic: closed-loop optogenetic suppression

Many of our most impressive skills, from speech to music, evolve across many dimensions and are learned spontaneously without external reinforcement. While we know much about how the basal ganglia contribute to learning low-dimensional, externally reinforced behaviors like lever pressing, their contribution to learning high-dimensional behaviors is less clear. Birdsong learning is a paradigmatic example of high-dimensional learning. Juvenile songbirds vary many acoustic dimensions as they learn to copy their tutor’s song, a spontaneous process that evolves without external reinforcement. While

New memories are integrated into prior knowledge of the world. But what if consecutive memories exert opposing demands on the host brain network? We report that acquiring a robust (food-context) memory constrains the hippocampus within a population activity space of highly correlated spike trains that prevents subsequent computation of a flexible (object- location) memory. This densely correlated firing structure developed over repeated mnemonic experience, gradually coupling neurons of the superficial CA1 pyramidale sublayer to whole population activity. Applying hippocampal theta-driven clos