When your brain has a mind of its own: discussions between cortex and brainstem.
If you’ve ever just wandered through the wilderness you may have noticed wild mice. As you approach, one mouse may show fear while another shows curiosity despite the mice having objectively similar sensory input.
Our lab studies how past experience changes subjective interpretation of sensory input, which in turn affects one’s sense of anxiety versus safety and body physiology.
To address these questions we use 2-photon imaging in virtual reality environments and endoscope imaging in freely behaving mice.
Retroviral tracing has revealed that in as few as three synapses, in primates and rodents, the cortex innervates the adrenal medulla (refs. 1, 2), a key organ in generating autonomic, sympathetic, “fight or flight” responses. One of the regions through which information from cortex to body organs of the sympathetic system passes is the brainstem.
Given this intriguing neuroanatomy, some of the questions in which we are interested are:
How do the cortex and brainstem interact in multimodal processes? How are traumatic experiences with sensory input communicated between these regions? Is there a biological basis for therapeutic interventions such as music (3) used extensively in human rehabilitation (4), and which a substantial amount of research has shown affects rodents’ brain activity, anxiety levels, spatial and auditory learning, and neuroplasticity (5)? What is the biological basis for anxiety reduction upon viewing scenes of nature (6,7,8)?
We don't just want to know how our brains control us but also how we can control our brains.