The auditory networks of Orthoptera offer a model system uniquely suited to the study of neuronal connectivity and lesion-dependent neural plasticity. Monaural animals, following the permanent removal of one ear in nymphs or adults, adjust their auditory pathways by collateral sprouting of afferents and deafferented interneurons which connect to neurons on the contralateral side. Transient lesi...

One of the most prominent features of the electrical activity of dissociated cultured neural networks is the phenomenon of network bursts. Profiles of the instantaneous firing rate during bursts vary in shape and intensity during neuronal culture development. To shed some light on burst profile variability we constructed “pacemaker-driven” random recurrent neural network models with both static...

Context: The current study aimed to review research articles concerning cortical representational plasticity following the manipulations of inputs. Evidence Acquisition: This review article compromised previous studies in PubMed, Google Scholar and Scientific Information databases according to the keywords since 1988. Results: CA1 neurons depolarization paired with CA3 presynaptic input result ...

Neurotrophic factors are critical regulators of the formation and plasticity of neuronal networks. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is abundant in the brain and periphery, and is found in both human serum and plasma. Animal studies have demonstrated that stress reduces BDNF expression or activity in the hippocampus and that this reduction can be prevented by treatment with antidepressan...

Decision making often requires simultaneously learning about and combining evidence from various sources of information. However, when making inferences from these sources, humans show systematic biases that are often attributed to heuristics or limitations in cognitive processes. Here we use a combination of experimental and modelling approaches to reveal neural substrates of probabilistic inf...

Plasticity is a specific endowment of the nervous system to develop, to react or to adjust to the internal and external 'environmental changes, both in the physiological and pathological conditions. Cumulative evidence has revealed the dynamism of the nervous system, based on the balance between the rigidity and plasticity. Different aspects of neuroplasticity can employ common general cellular...

The temperature at which in vitro electrophysiological experiments are performed varies widely between laboratories. Recently it was shown that the production of cytokines within brain slices is dependent upon incubation temperature (Blond et al. 2001). The pro-inflammatory cytokine interleukin-1b (IL-1b) exerts a number of neuromodulatory effects in the CNS. Therefore the aim of our study was ...

Standard evolutionary dynamics is limited by the constraints of the genetic system. A central message of evolutionary neurodynamics is that evolutionary dynamics in the brain can happen in a neuronal niche in real time, despite the fact that neurons do not reproduce. We show that Hebbian learning and structural synaptic plasticity broaden the capacity for informational replication and guided va...

Various forms of synaptic plasticity, including spike timing-dependent plasticity, can be accounted for by calcium-dependent models of synaptic plasticity. However, recent results in which synaptic plasticity is induced by multi-spike protocols cannot simply be accounted for by linear superposition of plasticity due to spike pairs or by existing calcium-dependent models. In this paper, we show ...