The inferior colliculus (IC) of the pallid bat has a large percentage of neurons that respond selectively to the rate and direction of the bat's echolocation pulse, a downward FM sweep. Three underlying mechanisms have been previously described. Here we describe a fourth mechanism, facilitation, that shapes selectivity for both sweep rate and direction. The neurons studied are termed FM special...

The tail-withdrawal reflex of Aplysia can be sensitized by weak stimulation of a site outside the site used to test the reflex or by repeatedly stimulating the test site itself. The sensitization of tail-withdrawal responses is associated with enhanced activation of the tail motor neurons and heterosynaptic facilitation of the monosynaptic connections between the tail sensory neurons and tail m...

Saitow, Fumihito, Shin’Ichiro Satake, Junko Yamada, and Shiro Konishi. b-Adrenergic receptor-mediated presynaptic facilitation of inhibitory GABAergic transmission at cerebellar interneuron-Purkinje cell synapses. J Neurophysiol 84: 2016–2025, 2000. Norepinephrine (NE) has been shown to elicit long-term facilitation of GABAergic transmission to rat cerebellar Purkinje cells (PCs) through b-adre...

In current models of Parkinson disease (PD), loss of nigrostriatal dopaminergic input results in disordered output from basal ganglia to thalamocortical pathways. This interferes with the function of sensory-motor cortex and likely causes many of the cardinal motor symptoms, including akinesia, bradykinesia, and rigidity. Treatment with L-dopa, pallidotomy, or deep brain stimulation of the subt...

We analytically describe a transition scenario to self-organized criticality (SOC) that is new for physics as well as neuroscience; it combines the criticality of first and second-order phase transitions with a SOC phase. We consider a network of pulse-coupled neurons interacting via dynamical synapses, which exhibit depression and facilitation as found in experiments. We analytically show the ...

The present twin study investigates heritability of motor cortex excitability, measured by the paired pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation technique. Specifically, intracortical facilitation (ICF) and inhibition (ICI) and corticospinal excitability were tested in monozygotic (MZ), dizygotic (DZ), and unrelated pairs (UP). Robust ICF and ICI effects were found, with a higher similarity of MZ ...

In the present study we used single and paired-pulse Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to evaluate the effect of implied motion on primary motor cortex microcircuits. We found that observation of the implied motion of a static image increases MEP amplitude and reduces short-interval intracortical inhibition (SICI), without significant modulation of intracortical facilitation and sensory-m...