Read our new paper in Nature Magazine: “Goal specific hippocampal inhibition gates learning”
by Nuri Jeong, PhD, Xiao Zheng, Abigail Paulson, Stephanie Prince, and colleagues.
Navigating the world depends on rapidly learning the paths to important places. This process has long been attributed to the activity of excitatory neurons that represent places while inhibitory interneurons were thought to play only supporting roles. Nuri and Xiao found that inhibitory interneurons are central to swiftly learning important places. We discovered that interneurons act as gatekeepers that open specifically on paths to important locations and enable learning for those places. Probing deeper, this inhibitory gating is vital to neural mechanisms of spatial memory: reactivation of excitatory cells’ neural patterns that represent paths to a goal. In contrast to a support role, inhibitory cells are proactive players in memory formation by selecting relevant information for memory processing.
Check out the full paper here or the smart PDF here
Get the back story behind the paper, here
Art: “Gateway to Memory” by Myriam Wares.