Music is a universal language and a powerful force in the world. It can have incredible impact on our brain and easily make us cry or make us joyful. Just a few notes of a song can cause us to remember memories long past. In this 2018 Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society lecture, Pat Metheny discusses, with a panel of SfN members, the impact of music on the brain and on our emotions and memory; the process of creativity in music, art, and science; and the role of music in healing.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) adversely affects the learning, social interaction, and daily living of affected children. Atomoxetine (ATX) hydrochloride (HCI) has been widely used in clinical practice. Electroencephalogram (EEG) biofeedback, as a nonpharmacological treatment approach, has also demonstrated potential in improving symptoms in children with ADHD. We aimed to investigate the clinical efficacy of combining ATX HCI with EEG biofeedback in the treatment of ADHD in children. We hypothesized that this combined therapy would be more effective in alleviating symptoms in children with ADHD. Ninety children with ADHD were randomly separated into the control group (receiving ATX HCI treatment for 12 weeks) and study group (receiving ATX HCI treatment for 12 weeks combined with 60 sessions of EEG biofeedback treatment; n  = 45). Swanson, Nolan, and Pelham-IV (SNAP-IV) rating scale scores, integrated visual and auditory continuous performance test results, Conners parent symptom question...

Auditory masking—the interference of the encoding and processing of an acoustic stimulus imposed by one or more competing stimuli—is nearly omnipresent in daily life and presents a critical barrier to many listeners, including people with hearing loss, users of hearing aids and cochlear implants, and people with auditory processing disorders. The perceptual aspects of masking have been actively studied for several decades, and particular emphasis has been placed on masking of speech by other speech sounds. The neural effects of such masking, especially at the subcortical level, have been much less studied, in large part due to the technical limitations of making such measurements. Recent work has allowed estimation of the auditory brainstem response (ABR), whose characteristic waves are linked to specific subcortical areas, to naturalistic speech. In this study, we used those techniques to measure the encoding of speech stimuli that were masked by one or more simultaneous other speech stimuli. We presented...

Response preparation is accomplished by gradual accumulation in neural activity until a threshold is reached. In humans, such a preparatory signal, referred to as the lateralized readiness potential (LRP), can be observed in the EEG over sensorimotor cortical areas before execution of a voluntary movement. Although well described for manual movements, less is known about preparatory EEG potentials for saccadic eye movements in humans and nonhuman primates. Hence, we describe a LRP over the frontolateral cortex in macaque monkeys. Homologous to humans, we observed lateralized electrical potentials ramping before the execution of both rewarded and nonrewarded contralateral saccades. This potential parallels the neural spiking of saccadic movement neurons in the frontal eye field (FEF), suggesting that it may offer a noninvasive correlate of intracortical spiking activity. However, unlike neural spiking in the FEF, polarization in frontolateral channels did not distinguish between saccade generation and inhib...

Humans can adapt their movements in response to expected and unexpected perturbations. The speed and accuracy of these movement corrections may depend on the type of sensory information driving the perception of these perturbations. While previous research has indicated that corrections based on somatosensory information, comprised of proprioceptive and tactile inputs, are faster than corrections based on visual information, other studies have found comparable correction speeds in response to visual and tactile inputs. The purpose of this study was to systematically investigate the latencies (how fast) and magnitudes (how large) of movement corrections in response to perturbations of external visual targets, as well as somatosensory (proprioceptive and tactile) and tactile targets on the non-reaching limb. Participants performed reaching movements to a light-emitting diode (i.e., visual target), the felt position of a brush touching the index finger of the non-reaching hand (i.e., a tactile target), and th...

The re-emergence of task-related activation patterns during awake rest has been reported to play a role in memory consolidation and perceptual learning. This study aimed to test whether such reactivation occurs in the primary sensorimotor cortex following a visuomotor task. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning, 42 healthy participants (13 women and 29 men) learned visuomotor tracking, while a rotational perturbation was introduced between the cursor position and joystick angle. This visuomotor task block was interleaved with a control block, during which participants passively viewed a replay of their previously performed cursor movements. Half of the participants used their right hand, whereas the other half used their left hand to control the joystick. Resting-state scans were acquired before and after the visuomotor task sessions. A multivariate pattern classifier was trained to classify task and control blocks and was then tested on resting-state scans collected before and after...

Human motor skill acquisition is improved by performance feedback, and coupling such feedback with extrinsic reward (such as money) can enhance skill learning. However, the neurophysiology underlying such behavioral effect is unclear. To bridge this gap, we assessed the effects of reward on multiple forms of motor plasticity during skill learning. Sixty-five healthy participants divided into three groups performed a pinch-grip skill task with sensory feedback only, sensory and reinforcement feedback, or both feedback coupled with an extrinsic monetary reward during skill training. To probe motor plasticity, we applied transcranial magnetic stimulation at rest, on the left primary motor cortex before, at an early-training time point, and after training in the three groups and measured motor-evoked potentials from task-relevant muscle of the right arm. This allowed us to evaluate the amplitude and variability of corticospinal output, GABAergic short-intracortical inhibition, and use-dependent plasticity befo...

Perceptual decision-making describes the process of selecting an appropriate action based on the sensory information present in the immediate environment and is hence an omnipresent factor in the life of animals. In preclinical research, a widespread approach to study the neuronal correlates of perceptual decision-making is to record (and manipulate) neuronal activity in head-fixed mice performing behavioral tasks. In contrast to the technologies used to record/manipulate neuronal activity, standardization of the behavioral training of mice is generally neglected, a circumstance that is particularly true for behavioral tasks involving auditory stimuli. Here, we present the DMC-Behavior Platform, an open-source, cost-efficient framework for training head-fixed mice in perceptual decision-making tasks involving auditory stimuli. Combining the DMC-Behavior Platform with strategies to record and manipulate neuronal activity offers many opportunities to test hypotheses on the neuronal underpinnings of cognitive...

T-Type calcium channels shape neuronal excitability driving burst firing, plasticity, and neuronal oscillations that influence circuit activity. The three biophysically distinct T-type channel subtypes (Cav3.1, Cav3.2, Cav3.3) are differentially expressed in the brain, contributing to divergent physiological processes. Cav3.2 channels are highly expressed in the dentate gyrus (DG) of the hippocampus, and mice lacking Cav3.2 [knock-out (KO)] exhibit impairments in hippocampal dependent learning and memory tasks, as well as attenuated development of pilocarpine induced epilepsy. Owing to neurogenesis, granule cells (GCs) are continuously added to the DG, generating a heterogeneous population of maturational stages with distinct excitability. While initial studies identified the role of Cav3.2 in mature GC burst firing, its functional relevance in the intrinsic excitability of different GC subpopulations has not yet been examined. In this study, we used juvenile Cav3.2 KO mice to examine the contributions of ...

Substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) dopaminergic (DA) neurons are characterized by specific morphological and electrophysiological properties. First, in ∼90% of the cases, their axon arises from an axon-bearing dendrite (ABD) at highly variable distances from the soma. Second, they display a highly regular pattern of spontaneous activity (aka pacemaking) and a broad action potential (AP) that faithfully back-propagates through the entire dendritic arbor. In previous studies ( [Moubarak et al., 2019][1]; [Moubarak et al., 2022][2]), we demonstrated that the presence of a high density of sodium current in the ABD and the complexity of this dendrite played a critical role in the robustness of pacemaking and setting the half-width of the AP. In the current study, we investigated the postnatal development of both morphology and AP shape in SNc DA neurons in order to determine when and how the mature electrophysiological phenotype of these neurons was achieved. To do so, we performed electrophysiological record...