We’ve all zoned out during a long meeting. But what happens in the brain when you suddenly perk up? That transition from one behavioral state to another is the focus of a new study published last week in the journal Neuron led by Jessica Cardin, assistant professor in the department of neurobiology at Yale University and a member of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience.
By studying the electrical activity of brain cells in the visual cortex of mice that were resting or moving on a treadmill, Cardin and her team found that an animal's level of arousal, or wakefulness, profoundly changed the way its brain processed sensory information, such as visual stimuli. When the mice were highly alert, information about the visual world was encoded more effectively in the brain.
“That finding is very intuitive. When you’re drowsy and tuning out, you don’t really retain information very well. The opposite is true when you’re focused and alert,” said Cardin.
How behavior changes the way the brain processes the flow of sensory information from the world around us is an important fundamental question in neuroscience. But it may also help us understand how the brain malfunctions in disorders such as schizophrenia and autism.
"By understanding how these circuits function when they are working correctly, we can then move on and ask how they are broken in disease states,” said Cardin.
To learn more about this study, watch the video abstract produced by the Cardin Lab.