Meta-plasticity

Anesthetics induce a reversible coma-like state and alter the brain excitation. We showed that repeated exposure to ketamine causes the loss of the perineuronal nets (PNN) and reestablishes juvenile-like plasticity in the adult visual cortex (V1) (Venturino et al, 2021). Microglia enable the PNN dismantling and their depletion prevented this effect. In a side investigation, we observed that under acute ketamine exposure, microglia adapt in a sex-dependent manner. Thus, is there a sex-specific effect of how microglia modulate neuronal activity? Here, we show a sex-specific adaptation of the neu

Humans have the ability to quickly adapt to new tasks and generalise what they learned to improve the learning process itself. At the core of this capacity for meta-learning lies a difficult credit assignment problem. After a learning episode, the system needs to determine how to change the components of plasticity such that the next time a similar task is encountered, a better learning outcome can be arrived at more quickly. In machine learning, this problem is often approached by storing the entire learning trajectory and revisiting it in reverse-time order, a process that places large deman