Society for Neuroscience Starts Saturday!!!!!
I’ll post anything particularly interesting that I learn….for now, here is what I’m presenting:
Hello Toronto! I’m in town for the APA conference (yes, the American Psychological Association is having its annual meeting in Canada).
Check out my photos from when I was in Toronto this past December.
Also, here’s what I’ll be presenting:
BACKGROUND: Systemic exposure to amphetamine (AMPH) leads to a number of long-lasting neuroadaptations including changes in dendritic morphology in rat forebrain. It remains unknown whether these changes relate to associative drug conditioning or to nonassociative drug sensitization, two forms of plasticity produced by systemic exposure to AMPH. METHODS: We compared the behavioral, neuronal, and morphologic consequences of exposing rats to intraperitoneal (IP) AMPH to those of exposure to AMPH applied to the ventral tegmental area (VTA), infusions that sensitize AMPH-induced locomotion and nucleus accumbens (NAcc) DA overflow but do not produce drug conditioning. RESULTS: Both IP and VTA AMPH exposure sensitized locomotion and NAcc DA overflow, but only IP AMPH exposure produced conditioned locomotion. Importantly, whereas IP AMPH exposure increased spine density and dendritic length and branching in the NAcc, exposure to VTA AMPH produced the opposite effects. A similar differentiation of effects was observed in cortical areas. CONCLUSIONS: Together these findings suggest that the morphological changes seen following IP AMPH exposure reflect associative drug conditioning rather than nonassociative drug sensitization. The decreases observed in the NAcc of VTA AMPH exposed rats may reflect the inability of these infusions to support conditioning.
Sleep: Spring Cleaning For The Brain?
If you’ve ever been sleep-deprived, you know the feeling that your brain is full of wool.
Now, a study published in the April 3 edition of the journal Science has molecular and structural evidence of that woolly feeling — proteins that build up in the brains of sleep-deprived fruit flies and drop to lower levels in the brains of the well-rested. The proteins are located in the synapses, those specialized parts of neurons that allow brain cells to communicate with other neurons.
Sleep researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health believe it is more evidence for their theory of “synaptic homeostasis.” This is the idea that synapses grow stronger when we’re awake as we learn and adapt to an ever-changing the environment, that sleep refreshes the brain by bringing synapses back to a lower level of strength. This is important because larger synapses consume a lot of energy, occupy more space and require more supplies, including the proteins examined in this study.
Sleep — by allowing synaptic downscaling — saves energy, space and material, and clears away unnecessary “noise” from the previous day, the researchers believe. The fresh brain is then ready to learn again in the morning…. (continues @ ScienceDaily)
