Lateral hypothalamic orexin/hypocretin (OH) circuits are required for stable consciousness and loss of OH signals cause narcolepsy in humans, dogs and mice. While it was previously shown that OH predominantly activates deep cortical layers responsible for cortical brain state dynamics, here we show that orexin knockout (KO) causes a striking 50% reduction in the amplitude of fast glutamatergic...
A central function of cognition is to detect relevant sensory signals to adapt behavior.
To this end, a specialized neural system in insects learns associations between relevant sensory inputs and beneficial changes in behavior, the mushroom body (MB). However, whereas the prevalent idea is that learning in the MB mainly occurs during the presence of explicit reinforcement, such as sucrose...
Humans excel at rapidly learning and flexibly performing multiple tasks. This cognitive flexibility is thought to be the hallmark of human intelligence. Flexible learning requires retaining and utilizing previously learnt information while remaining sensitive to changes in the environment as well as rapid mental adjustments across different tasks. An open question remains how the brain...
Ring models are widely used in neuroscience to study fundamental mechanisms such as response sharpening and working memory. Ring networks composed of spiking neurons in the balanced state can reliably reproduce the irregular activity observed in vivo and exhibit phenomena like response sharpening through local inhibition and feature tuning emerging in random networks. In principle, balanced...
Heterogeneity is an inherent feature of biological systems that is often treated as a source of noise or disregarded in analyses of network function. In a series of computational studies, we systematically examine task-independent, intrinsic heterogeneity within neuronal systems and evaluate their role in solving a wide range of tasks with varying levels of complexity. Our findings demonstrate...
