Which of these famous "spatial cell" type is better?
Well, which is your favourite anyway? Yes it's a silly question
#SillyPoll #Neuroscience #PlaceCells #GridCells #BorderCells #BVCs #HeadDirectionCells
The latest #HeadDirectionCells paper, directly from the #TaubeLab!
Comparison of head direction cell firing characteristics across thalamo-parahippocampal circuitry
”anterior dorsal thalamus (#ADN), postsubiculum (#PoS), parasubiculum (#PaS), medial entorhinal (#MEC), and postrhinal (#POR) cortices. We report that HD cells with a high degree of directional specificity were observed in all five brain regions, but ADN HD cells display greater sharpness and stability in their preferred directions, and greater anticipation of future headings compared to parahippocampal regions” (hashtags added by me)
A little summary of #Neuroscience-related hashtags?
(Please add any you think of in answer and I’ll edit the list)
.#NeuroArt
.#Neuroscientist / #Neuroscientists
.#NeuroRat (yep, I’m pretty much the only one using this one)
The cell types:
.#PlaceCells / #GridCells / #HeadDirectionCells / #SplitterCells … (give me more)
And then we have the brain regions:
.#Hippocampus / #Striatum / #RetrosplenialCortex / #Cortex / #Cerebellum / …
Bonus:
.# NeuroBuzz: once a post takes off, anyone can add it as an answer and then the author can edit it in the original post (but don’t add it when writing the original post, that’s cheating)
Looking for a PhD position in #SpatialCognition in rats? Check this out, with one of the best scientists and supervisors: Francesca Sargolini in Marseille, France!
"PhD position on neuroanatomical and functional determinants of head-direction firing activity"
More info in the pdf screenshot.
#NeuroRat #HeadDirectionCells #VestibularSystem #PhDPosition
PS: this is the lab where I did my PhD and I strongly recommend it - let me know if you have any questions!
The kids I grew up with knew I was "different", but my parents and school insisted I was normal. Now I've explored #Autism #Prosopagnosia #Alexithymia and #Aphantasia and have an idea what was going on, but then I thought everyone saw the world like I did, just coped better. I coped by becoming a #PluralSystem by age three when I realized my girl self would have to be hidden. After six "guy" IDs, I'm now back being that girl. Still running the system, but with more E and less T...
Age nine I was forced to wear #Bifocal #PlusLensTheory glasses every waking moment. Shattered my body sense and #CognitiveMap - https://www.psychoros.com/consumed-by-the-light/ Spent endless days of lonely boredom exploring the ~30° wedges of #SpatialViewCells and the flat dioramas between them. Now I'm rebuilding a 3D world around my body, where #HeadDirectionCells can have a single basis and #DorsalStream depth can pop out of the flat distance like content from a random dot stereogram.
Despite all that, I've been online since #ARPAnet and #DJNR, wrote the first magazine article with simultaneous code distribution (via 8" floppies in the post), coded fab robots to move 6" & 8" Silicon wafers, built my (almost) independent #SolarPV and #SolarThermal house (7K lines of C++ from 1998, 42 device outs), and evolved an audio system with bandwidth from DC to a half MHz. Helped raise four unique kids, as adult minds in young bodies. Still mystify most of the adults I encounter...
After reading it ⤴️, I can confirm it is super cool!
Read it and let us know what you think!!
Can the rats really control their place cell activity like this, even though they're not actually moving?🤯
What if we tried this with #HeadDirectionCells - do you think it would work as well? 👀
I seem to remember someone here posting a question about the relative vividness of dreams versus waking life. Can't find it now. But it has made me think while writing my dream notes...
From this morning:
-
I think I found it digging in an old equipment collection, a complex device that supposedly controlled temperature for some bigger system. About 6" diameter, there was a setting lever that moved 180° around a serrated red pre-plastic circle at the bottom. That rotated the vertical rod mechanism that extended up about 7" at the center of the device. Maybe an inch out from the bottom of the rod, on a mount that didn't rotate, was a tiny motor with an inch of exposed ~1/32" shaft extending above its top, angled to point toward the top of the main center rod. Seemed it was supposed to rotate more mechanism via a rubber wheel touching it, but I never found that. A long way from understanding the thing.
Most of those details were not images, or at least were instantly converted to logical conclusions and lost to "vision".
But clearly I saw a vivid picture image of the black handle at the end of the lever and the red serrated semicircle it moved around, to the point it was obviously not modern smooth shiny bright red plastic, but the flat grainy orange-red "bakelite" from my childhood. It was a single still image that stayed the same as I moved the lever back and forth between its limits - the lever disappeared from attention and only logically moved.
And I saw a vivid image of the tiny motor shaft, its perfect shiny finish and its angle (but the image did not extend to include the bottom half of the motor, or the top of the device it pointed at, that conclusion was only "felt"). The rest of the device was only "seen" as a vague memory of first touching it, general size and shape, not enough light or detail to resolve any of the internals.
-
The problem with any conclusions from this is that my daily vision works the same way - each object has an "icon view" (saved from my first encounter with the object) with a current spatial reference to my entry path into the room, or the front of the house, or north. More detailed views are tiny snapshots located only by #SpatialViewCells, no connection to #HeadDirectionCells or objective directions except that I remember where the icon currently is. (At least that's how I explain it to myself...)
New review on the “spatial cells” across different species! Looks very interesting:
Neural mechanisms for spatial cognition across vertebrates
Vinepinsky & Segev 2023
Small but important comment: it is perfectly normal for place cells to have multiple #PlaceFields ! Only in very small environments (<80cm diameter) will you mostly see single-field place cells. The single field is probably more the exception than the rule in the natural world.
#NeuroPaper #Review #Neuroscience #PlaceCells #HeadDirectionCells #GridCells #BVCs #CrossSpecies
"A Topological Deep Learning Framework for Neural Spike Decoding"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.05037
#Neuroscience #Neuro #Brain #MachineLearning #DeepLearning #FeatureExtraction #SpikeTrains #GridCells #HeadDirectionCells
The brain's spatial orientation system uses different neuron ensembles to aid in environment-based navigation. Two of the ways brains encode spatial information is through head direction cells and grid cells. Brains use head direction cells to determine orientation whereas grid cells consist of layers of decked neurons that overlay to provide environment-based navigation. These neurons fire in ensembles where several neurons fire at once to activate a single head direction or grid. We want to capture this firing structure and use it to decode head direction grid cell data. Understanding, representing, and decoding these neural structures requires models that encompass higher order connectivity, more than the 1-dimensional connectivity that traditional graph-based models provide. To that end, in this work, we develop a topological deep learning framework for neural spike train decoding. Our framework combines unsupervised simplicial complex discovery with the power of deep learning via a new architecture we develop herein called a simplicial convolutional recurrent neural network. Simplicial complexes, topological spaces that use not only vertices and edges but also higher-dimensional objects, naturally generalize graphs and capture more than just pairwise relationships. Additionally, this approach does not require prior knowledge of the neural activity beyond spike counts, which removes the need for similarity measurements. The effectiveness and versatility of the simplicial convolutional neural network is demonstrated on head direction and trajectory prediction via head direction and grid cell datasets.
El Duvelle Neuro
El Duvelle
LorenAmelang
LorenAmelang
Dominic Boutet