BACKGROUND About 30% of people on Earth have latent toxoplasmosis. Infected subjects do not express any clinical symptoms, however, they carry dormant stages of parasite Toxoplasma for the rest of their life. This form of toxoplasmosis is mostly considered harmless, however, recent studies showed its specific effects on physiology, behaviour and its associations with various diseases, including...

Prepulse inhibition (PPI) is typically associated with an attenuation of auditory startle behavior in mammals and is presumably mediated within the brainstem startle circuit. However, the inhibitory mechanisms underlying PPI are not yet clear. We addressed this question with complementary behavioral and in vivo electrophysiological experiments in the startle escape circuit of goldfish, the Maut...

Schizophrenic patients are known to suffer from a number of information processing disturbances, including deficits in both prepulse inhibition of startle and latent inhibition. Since these behavioral phenomena can also be observed in animals, they represent an ideal starting point for developing animal models having construct validity for specific deficits observed in schizophrenia. The princi...

Despite their essential roles in signal processing in the brain, the functions of interneurons currently remain unclear in humans. We recently developed a method using the prepulse inhibition of sensory evoked cortical responses for functional measurements of interneurons. When a sensory feature is abruptly changed in a continuous sensory stimulus, change-related cortical responses are recorded...

Prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the startle reflex at short lead intervals is thought to reflect the operation of a preattentive "sensorimotor gating" mechanism, which suggests that processing of the prepulse stimulus should not be modulated prior to its inhibitory effects on startle. To test this hypothesis, we examined whether PPI is affected following habituation to the prepulse. PPI was measur...

Several presynaptic proteins involved in neurotransmitter release in the CNS have been implicated in schizophrenia in human clinical genetic studies, in postmortem studies, and in studies of putative animal models of schizophrenia. The presynaptic protein RIM1alpha mediates presynaptic plasticity and cognitive function. We now demonstrate that mice deficient in RIM1alpha exhibit abnormalities i...

OBJECTIVE To measure the effects of a prepulse stimulus on the blink reflex responses elicited by an electrical stimulation of the supraorbital nerve in patients with blepharospasm with and without an effective sensory trick. DESIGN Blink reflexes to supraorbital nerve stimulation were preceded in test trials by a prepulse electrical stimulus to the third finger at various leading intervals. ...

OBJECTIVE Prepulse inhibition (PPI) is an operational measure of sensory gating. PPI of cortical response to a startling pulse is known to be modulated by attention. With a time-frequency analysis, we sought to determine whether goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention differentially modulate inhibition of cortical oscillations elicited by a startling pulse. METHODS An electroencephalogram...

Disruption of the early stages of information processing in limbic brain circuits may underlie symptoms of severe neuropsychiatric disorders. Prepulse inhibition of acoustic startle (PPI) is diminished in many of these disorders and may reflect the disruption of this CNS function. PPI is associated with brain activity in many of the same regions in humans as it is in laboratory animals, suggest...

Activation of N- and P/Q-type voltage-gated calcium channels triggers neurotransmitter release at central and peripheral synapses. These channels are targets for regulatory mechanisms, including inhibition by G-protein-linked receptors. Inhibition of P/Q-type channels has been less well studied than the extensively characterized inhibition of N-type channels, but it is thought that they are inh...