Topic: tonic cholinergic activity

Cholinergic activity is thought to play an important role in learning and the control of brain state. Multiple studies have shown that pairing external phasic stimulation of the cholinergic basal forebrain (CBF) with a sensory stimulus drives long-lasting sensory cortical plasticity, implicating the CBF as a potential substrate for associative learning. For this to be ecologically valid, we hypothesized that CBF projections to the sensory cortex should exhibit phasic signaling that is temporally-synchronous with sensory-evoked responses in cortical neurons. Intrinsic sensory-evoked responses h