Electric and chemical excitability of muscles present a supravital reaction which is of major importance in achieving a more precise estimating of the time since death in the early post-mortem period. The purpose of this paper is to examine the electric and chemical excitability of the muscles in cases with a known time of death, in order to determine their importance in the estimation of time ...

Tonic inhibition is thought to dampen the excitability of principal neurons; however, little is known about the role of tonic GABAergic inhibition in interneurons and the impact on principal neuron excitability. In many brain regions, tonic GABAergic inhibition is mediated by extrasynaptic, δ-subunit-containing GABAA receptors (GABAARs). In the present study we demonstrate the importance of GAB...

Neuronal or axonal ion channel function can be impaired or altered in a number of disorders, such as acquired (autoantibody-mediated, toxic, and metabolic) and genetic channelopathies, and even neurodegenerative (motor neuron disease) or inflammatory diseases (multiple sclerosis, immune-mediated neuropathies). When specific channels are affected, axonal/neuronal excitability primarily alters ac...

Responsiveness of cortical neurons to sensory inputs can be altered by experience and learning. While synaptic plasticity is generally proposed as the underlying cellular mechanism, possible contributions of activity-dependent changes in intrinsic excitability remain poorly investigated. Here, we show that periods of rhythmic firing in rat barrel cortex layer 5 pyramidal neurons can trigger a l...

Neurons adapt their electrophysiological properties to maintain stable levels of electrical excitability when faced with a constantly changing environment. We find that exposing freely swimming Xenopus tadpoles to 4-5 hr of persistent visual stimulation increases the intrinsic excitability of optic tectal neurons. This increase is correlated with enhanced voltage-gated Na+ currents. The same vi...

In visual cortex monocular deprivation (MD) during a critical period (CP) reduces the ability of the deprived eye to activate cortex, but the underlying cellular plasticity mechanisms are incompletely understood. Here we show that MD reduces the intrinsic excitability of layer 5 (L5) pyramidal neurons and enhances long-term potentiation of intrinsic excitability (LTP-IE). Further, MD and LTP-IE...

It is possible to comprehend speech and discriminate languages by viewing a speaker's articulatory movements. Transcranial magnetic stimulation studies have shown that viewing speech enhances excitability in the articulatory motor cortex. Here, we investigated the specificity of this enhanced motor excitability in native and non-native speakers of English. Both groups were able to discriminate ...

We used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to clarify how non-verbal emotionally-characterized sounds modulate the excitability of the corticospinal motor tract (CST). While subjects were listening to sounds (monaurally and binaurally), single TMS pulses were delivered to either left or right primary motor cortex (M1), and electromyographic activities were recorded from the contralateral a...

The entorhinal cortex (EC) provides the predominant excitatory drive to the hippocampal CA1 and subicular neurons in chronic epilepsy. Discerning the mechanisms underlying signal integration within EC neurons is essential for understanding network excitability alterations involving the hippocampus during epilepsy. Twenty-four hours following a single seizure episode when there were no behaviora...

Key points † Intraoperative neuromonitoring can be affected by specific general anaesthetics. † Changes in axonal excitability of primary sensory afferents with propofol and sevoflurane were investigated using threshold tracking technique. † Both anaesthetics similarly affected nerve excitability to a small but significant extent. † Possible mechanisms include direct anaesthetic effects on neur...