Neurons change their response to the same image over time

Scientists from the University of Washington in St. Louis have studied how the neurons of the visual cortex of the brain work

brain.

Previously it was believed that only neurons in the departmentsthe brain associated with smells and spatial memory over time change their responses to the same stimuli. Such features were not noticed behind the visual cortex.

We know that the brain is constantlya changing structure, so we expect that neuronal activity will change over the course of a few days if we learn or gain new experiences. What really surprised us was that even in the absence of learning, neural activity in different areas of the brain continues to change.

Ji Xia, study co-author

During the new work, the authors conducted an experiment:they showed mice a short video and recorded the activity of several hundred of their neurons in the primary visual cortex using two-photon calcium imaging. This was repeated for seven days in a row.

As a result, the researchers found that the response of individual neurons to video was unstable for weeks, which means that they reacted differently to the same images.

Previously, a similar process for other groups of neurons was called "representative drift." But the presence of drift in the visual cortex was a surprise for the authors of the work.

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