Topic: neuronal firing rates

How psychedelic drugs change the activity of cortical neuronal populations is not well understood. It is also not clear which changes are specific to transition into the psychedelic brain state and which are shared with other brain state transitions. Here, we used Neuropixels probes to record from large populations of neurons in prefrontal cortex of mice given the psychedelic drug TCB-2. The primary effect of drug ingestion was stretching of the distribution of log firing rates of the recorded population. This phenomenon was previously observed across transitions between sleep and wakefulness,

Body size varies across 21 orders of magnitudes in the animal kingdom [1]. In contrast to most organs, which scale through the proliferation of dividing cells of similar size, brains expand by modulating the size of non-dividing neuronal cells to innervate space during development [2]. Consequently, there is a notable variation in neuronal size and structure within individual brains and across species [3]. Considering that size inherently affects the rates of biological structures and processes, from cellular metabolism to information processing [4], the ability of neurons to maintain essentia