Topic: synaptic mechanisms

Interest in psychedelic compounds is growing due to their remarkable potential for understanding altered neural states and their breakthrough status to treat various psychiatric disorders. However, there are major knowledge gaps regarding how psychedelics affect the brain. The Computational Neuroscience Laboratory at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University, uses multimodal neuroimaging to test hypotheses of the brain’s functional reorganisation under psychedelics, informed by the accounts of hierarchical predictive processing, using dynamic causal modelling (DCM). D

Understanding how neural circuits in the brain compute information not only requires determining how individual inhibitory and excitatory elements of circuits are wired together, but also a detailed knowledge of their functional interactions. Recent advances in optogenetic techniques and mouse genetics now offer ways to specifically probe the functional properties of neural circuits with unprecedented specificity. Perhaps one of the most heavily interrogated circuits in the mouse brain is one in the retina that is involved in coding direction (reviewed by Mauss et al., 2017; Vaney et al., 2012