Topic: experience-dependent plasticity

Our brains must generate and maintain stable activity patterns over decades of life, despite the dramatic changes in circuit connectivity and function induced by learning and experience-dependent plasticity. How do our brains acheive this balance between opposing need for plasticity and stability? Over the past two decades, we and others have uncovered a family of “homeostatic” negative feedback mechanisms that are theorized to stabilize overall brain activity while allowing specific connections to be reconfigured by experience. Here I discuss recent work in which we demonstrate that individua

Can alterations in experience trigger different plastic modifications in neuronal structure and function, and if so, how do they integrate at the cellular level? To address this question, we interrogated circuitry in the mouse olfactory bulb responsible for the earliest steps in odor processing. We induced experience-dependent plasticity in mice of either sex by blocking one nostril for one day, a minimally invasive manipulation that leaves the sensory organ undamaged and is akin to the natural transient blockage suffered during common mild rhinal infections. We found that such brief sensory d

Sleep has been classically described as an all-or-nothing global phenomenon. However, a growing body of evidence indicates that typical sleep hallmarks, such as slow waves and spindles, occur and are regulated locally. I will present here evidence indicating that slow waves, in particular, may be related with, and offer a read-out of, local and long-range brain connectivity. In fact, slow waves do not only track changes related to both experience-dependent plasticity and brain maturation during development, but also appear to be actively involved in the fine regulation of brain plasticity and