Neurosciences and digital technologies combine into the booming field of “neurotechnologies” (NT). Prospects for medical applications are very promising. If the GAFAM invest millions of dollars in NT, this is not only to develop brain-machine interfaces to overcome disabilities and mental pathologies. There are also commercial issues aimed at the public, via the exploitation of brain data for personal uses and for supervision of individual behaviors. The capacity of NT to “manipulate the brains” calls for vigilance in two particular areas: respect of mental autonomy and protection of brain data. A major issue is to assess whether existing laws on the protection of human rights are sufficient to protect mental privacy or whether new rights - NeuroRights- must be established specifically. The present era is characterized by major advances in neurosciences and in digital technologies. Both combine into a booming field of investigation called “neurotechnologies” (NTs) that result from research into brain path...

In the article, “Perceptual Fading of a Stabilized Cortical Image: Replication in the Undergraduate Classroom,” by Nicole B. Massa, Jacob H. Deck, and Michael A. Grubb, which published …

Adaptation plays an important role in sensory systems as it dynamically modifies sensitivity to allow the detection of stimulus changes. The vomeronasal system controls many social behaviors in most mammals by detecting pheromones released by conspecifics. Stimuli activate a transduction cascade in vomeronasal neurons that leads to spiking activity. Whether and how these neurons adapt to stimuli is still debated and largely unknown. Here, we measured short-term adaptation performing current-clamp whole-cell recordings by using diluted urine as a stimulus, as it contains many pheromones. We measured spike-frequency adaptation in response to repeated identical stimuli from 2 to 10 s duration that was dependent on the time interval between stimuli. Responses to paired current steps, bypassing signal transduction cascade, also showed spike-frequency adaptation. We found that voltage-gated Na+ channels in VSNs undergo slow inactivation processes. Furthermore, recovery from slow inactivation of voltage-gated Na+...

The social world of young children primarily revolves around parents and caregivers, who play a key role in guiding children’s social and cognitive development. However, a hallmark of adolescence is a shift in orientation towards nonfamilial social targets, an adaptive process that prepares adolescents for their independence. Little is known regarding neurobiological signatures underlying changes in adolescents’ social orientation. Using functional brain imaging of human voice processing in children and adolescents (ages 7-16), we demonstrate distinct neural signatures for mother’s voice and nonfamilial voices across child and adolescent development in reward and social valuation systems, instantiated in nucleus accumbens and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. While younger children showed increased activity in these brain systems for mother’s voice compared to nonfamilial voices, older adolescents showed the opposite effect with increased activity for nonfamilial compared to mother’s voice. Findings uncover ...

Abnormal fear and anxiety can manifest as psychiatric disorders. The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) is implicated in sustained responding to, or anticipation of, an aversive event which can be expressed as anticipatory anxiety. The basolateral amygdala (BLA) is also active during anticipatory anxiety and sends projections to the BNST. However, little is known about the role for BLA neurons that project to BNST (BLA-BNST) in anticipatory anxiety in rodents. To address this, we tested if chemogenetic inactivation of the BLA-BNST pathway attenuates sustained conditioned responses produced by anticipation of an aversive stimulus. For comparison, we also assessed BLA-BNST inactivation during social interaction, which is sensitive to unlearned anxiety. We found that BLA-BNST inactivation reduced conditioned sustained freezing and increased social behaviors, but surprisingly, only in males. To determine if sex differences in BLA-BNST neuronal activity contribute to the differences in behavior, we used...

In humans, sleep spindles are 10-16 Hz oscillations lasting approximately 0.5-2 s. Spindles, along with cortical slow oscillations, may facilitate memory consolidation by enabling synaptic plasticity. Early recordings of spindles at the scalp found anterior channels had overall slower frequency than central-posterior channels. This robust, topographical finding led to dichotomizing spindles as ‘slow’ versus ‘fast’, modelled as two distinct spindle generators in frontal versus posterior cortex. Using a large dataset of intracranial sEEG recordings from 20 patients (13 female, 7 male) and 365 bipolar recordings, we show that the difference in spindle frequency between frontal and parietal channels is comparable to the variability in spindle frequency within the course of individual spindles, across different spindles recorded by a given site, and across sites within a given region. Thus, fast and slow spindles only capture average differences that obscure a much larger underlying overlap in frequency. Furthe...

Voltage-gated calcium channel Cav2.1 undergoes Ca2+-dependent facilitation and inactivation, which are important in short-term synaptic plasticity. In presynaptic terminals, Cav2.1 forms large protein complexes that include synaptotagmins. Synaptotagmin-7 is essential to mediate short-term synaptic plasticity in many synapses. Here, based on evidence that both Cav2.1 and synaptotagmin-7 are both required for short-term synaptic facilitation, we investigated the direct interaction of synaptotagmin-7 with Cav2.1 and probed its regulation of Cav2.1 function. We found that synaptotagmin-7 binds specifically to the α1A subunit of Cav2.1 through interaction with the synaptic-protein interaction (synprint) site. Surprisingly, this interaction enhances facilitation in paired-pulse protocols and accelerates the onset of facilitation. Synaptotagmin-7α induces a depolarizing shift in the voltage-dependence of activation of Cav2.1 and slows Ca2+-dependent inactivation, whereas synaptotagmin-7β and 7γ have smaller effe...

Cervical and trigeminal afferents innervate neighboring cranial territories, and their convergence on upper cervical dorsal horn neurons provides a potential substrate for pain referral in primary headache syndromes. Lamina I neurons are central to this mechanism, as they relay convergent nociceptive input to supraspinal pain centers. Unfortunately, little is known about the interactions between trigeminal and cervical afferents supplying Lamina I neurons. Here, we used rats of both sexes to show that cervical and trigeminal afferents interact via presynaptic inhibition, where monosynaptic inputs to Lamina I neurons undergo unidirectional as well as reciprocal presynaptic control. This means that afferent-driven presynaptic inhibition shapes the way trigeminal and cervical Aδ-fiber and C-fiber input reaches Lamina I projection neurons (PNs) and local-circuit neurons (LCNs). We propose that this inhibition provides a feedforward control of excitatory drive to Lamina I neurons that regulates their convergent...

Deactivation of G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) involves multiple phosphorylations followed by arrestin binding, which uncouples the GPCR from G-protein activation. Some GPCRs, such as rhodopsin, are reused many times. Arrestin dissociation and GPCR dephosphorylation are key steps in the recycling process. In vitro evidence suggests that visual arrestin (ARR1) binding to light-activated, phosphorylated rhodopsin hinders dephosphorylation. Whether ARR1 binding also affects rhodopsin dephosphorylation in vivo is not known. We investigated this using both male and female mice lacking ARR1. Mice were exposed to bright light and placed in darkness for different periods of time, and differently phosphorylated species of rhodopsin were assayed by isoelectric focusing. For WT mice, rhodopsin dephosphorylation was nearly complete by 1 h in darkness. Surprisingly, we observed that, in the Arr1 KO rods, rhodopsin remained phosphorylated even after 3 h. Delayed dephosphorylation in Arr1 KO rods cannot be explained...