@anneurai @aaronlwong @laurentperrinet

Yes, a bit slow it seems...

Please have a look at this #OldNeuroPapers differentiating premotor and motor RTs:

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1966-02307-001
(Botwinick& Thompson, 1966)

The time from visual stimulus to muscle activation can go down as low as 150ms (but no more than 250ms).

From muscle to movement is a whole different story.

Motor rhythms can self-recover days after their silencing via the deafferenciation of neuromodulatory inputs. This principle is well studied in the decapod crustacean's pyloric motor network in the stomatogastric ganglion (STG).

In this paper entitled “Long-Term Neuromodulatory Regulation of a Motor Pattern–Generating Network: Maintenance of Synaptic Efficacy and Oscillatory Properties”, Muriel-Thoby Brisson and John Simmmers showed that the recovery of the pyloric rhythm after central deafferanciation rely on coordinated changes in the magnitude of trensmembrane ionic currents of the neurons involved in motor pattern generation. A reduction in delayed-rectifier type potassium current (I(Kd)) and a calcium-dependent K(+) current, I(KCa), and an enhancement of hyperpolarization-activated inward current that resembles I(h) are involved.

This paper illustrates how powerful homeostatic plasticity can be in the face of extreme perturbations of the neuromodulatory environment.

#OldNeuroPapers

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/jn.00482.2001?rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed&url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org

@PessoaBrain @TEG. Thanks! 1980s. Since we already decided that's not old, at least for some of us (in terms of the #OldNeuroPapers initiative), let's call that newish.

@NicoleCRust @TEG

There were some versions of basal ganglia loops involving emotion/motivation in the mid 1980s.

The famous paper is of course this one, which led all textbooks to talk about a "limbic loop" (but please avoid this term!).

I never had the chance to track it further back, but it would be a beautiful project! 🙂

Also: current understanding of basal ganglia loops have evolved from the idea of segregated loops, although some still like this notion.

#neuroscience
#history
#OldNeuroPapers

Last one for today is this classic on > The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer's block” <

Pushing the hashtag a bit, it could maybe even count as an #OldNeuroPapers - not really Neuro but to promote the hasttag a bit!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/

#writing #writersblock

4/n

#OldNeuroPapers #neuroscience #HistoryOfIdeas #ITcortex #ObjectRecognition

Coda:

We see even in this coarse reading, establishing the role of IT cortex in object recognition and processing was nearly a six-decade culmination of work by multiple researchers working on the anatomy, physiology, theory and behavior.

Large parts of what I have written is from Society for Neuroscience’s “The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography” of Charlie Gross:
https://www.sfn.org/-/media/SfN/Documents/TheHistoryofNeuroscience/Volume-6/c4.pdf

I highly recommend to students and neuroscientists alike to make use of this excellent resource that SfN has to offer:
https://www.sfn.org/about/history-of-neuroscience/autobiographical-chapters

10/10

#OldNeuroPapers #neuroscience #HistoryOfIdeas #ITcortex #ObjectRecognition

Yasushi Miyashita and his group in Tokyo around the late 80s furthered the short-term pictorial memory in IT and how they relate to long term associational memory.

Justine Sergent at McGill in the early 90s showed the first evidence of a dedicated face processing region in the ventral stream, which Nancy Kanwisher later clearly established in the mid to late 90s for its domain specificity and calling it the Fusiform Face Area (FFA). Nancy also identified another region that was dedicated exclusively to places/scenes, Parahippocampal Place Area (PPA)

9/10

#OldNeuroPapers #neuroscience #HistoryOfIdeas #ITcortex #ObjectRecognition

Mort Mishkin and the Gross gang during the same period showed IT cortex receives inputs from the striate cortices, thus establishing the ventral stream visual pathway. In the early 80s, a plethora of what were then hard to synthesize/reconcile studies of different brain areas were synthesized by Mort Mishkin and the great Leslie Ungerleider, into what we now know as the famous the dual visual (dorsal and ventral stream) pathways for visual recognition.
8/10

#OldNeuroPapers #neuroscience #HistoryOfIdeas #ITcortex #ObjectRecognition

In the 1980s, much of the work on extra striate cortex, and IT was driven by Charlie's lab and his protégés, especially Bob Desimone, Tom Albright, and later Earl Miller, John Duncan. Their work further established IT neurons were selective to particular classes of objects, attention related effects, as well as suppression of activity by repeated presentation (including a sort of short-term memory).

7/10

#OldNeuroPapers #neuroscience #HistoryOfIdeas #ITcortex #ObjectRecognition

Charlie Gross then moved to Princeton in the 1970s. Bob Desimone (my mentor), and Tom Albright joined as some of his first grad students. The inimitable Eric Schwartz joined them as a postdoc for a couple years. The Gross lab in the mid to late 1970s established systematically that IT neurons responded to complex visual inputs, their overall shapes, and thus objects rather than to individual features like orientations, or color, or simple curvature. This led to the funny and famous story of the "toilet-brush" neurons. The toilet-brush neurons also responded to “hand” cells that Charlie had earlier identified, so the “fingers” in the two were the commonality. This led them to come up with the idea of Fourier shape descriptors to suggest how the brain builds the "it" from the "bits" (a forerunner to all the modern linear combination of activities to give an output response, including the currently in-vogue deepnet models).

6/10

#OldNeuroPapers #neuroscience #HistoryOfIdeas #ITcortex #ObjectRecognition

In the middle to late 1960s, then at MIT, George Gerstein, and a dashing young Charlie Gross (my intellectual grandfather), inspired by single neuron recordings of Hubel and Wiesel, and the work of Pribram and Mishkin, stuck microelectrodes in IT cortex of awake monkeys and showed that they responded to visual stimuli. This was the first demonstration of neurons being active for visual inputs far away from the striate areas!

Later Peter Schiller joined them in the experiments. They also showed these neurons were involved in attentional mechanisms. The input stimuli, however were still rudimentary and not resembling anything “object” like: diffused light, orientation, movement etc., And then by happenstance, Charlie found "face" and "hand" cells (much like how Hubel and Wiesel found orientation cells by complete accident, slipping of the image on the projector)!

5/10

#OldNeuroPapers #neuroscience #HistoryOfIdeas #ITcortex #ObjectRecognition

The great Karl Pribram (at Stanford) and Mortimer Mishkin (at NIH) towards the end of the 1960s performed focalized lesions in macaques in only the IT cortex (instead of the entire MTL as reported in Klüver-Bucy). In their experiments, they observed that such lesions only led to deficits in visual processing, and learning!

4/10

#OldNeuroPapers #neuroscience #HistoryOfIdeas #ITcortex #ObjectRecognition

While neurosurgeons were working with patients and characterizing the syndrome, there was a short interregnum in the world of visual neuroscience, thanks to the groundbreaking work (dare I say, paradigmatic leap) from David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel with their experiments in the striate cortex (V1, V2) and LGN.

3/10

#OldNeuroPapers #neuroscience #HistoryOfIdeas #ITcortex #ObjectRecognition

Heinrich Klüver in the 1930s wanted to study the effects of mescaline(!) in macaques after bilateral temporal lobectomy. Paul Bucy, a neurosurgeon performed the surgery and experiments. However, Bucy did not observe any of the hypothesized effects of mescaline and instead discovered that the animal had significant impairment/abnormalities. These broadly included: subdued/docile emotional expressions, adverse sexual behavior, dietary changes, utilization behaviors, increased tendency to use the mouth for exploring the world, and finally, but most importantly for our story, difficulties in visual learning and agnosia!

In the 1950s, neuroscientists and surgeons documented and confirmed similar behaviors in humans who had temporal lobectomy. Today, we know this as the famous/eponymous Klüver-Bucy syndrome due to bilateral lesions (or tumors) of the medial temporal lobe (MTL).

2/10

#OldNeuroPapers #neuroscience #HistoryOfIdeas #ITcortex #ObjectRecognition

Everyone in neuroscience has heard of the famous story of patient HM. The bilateral medial temporal lobectomy performed on him (in 1953) resecting most of his hippocampi to cure epilepsy, but led to him having anterograde amnesia. This observation directly implicated hippocampus as necessary for memory formation, thus kickstarting an entire field.

How did we arrive at the inferotemporal cortex (IT) as the region involved in object processing/recognition? The history of IT is even longer, not as straightforward as that of hippocampus, and in fact was a multi-decade culmination.

Here’s a shortish compressed history of how IT became the center of visual object recognition in ten toots!

1/10

#OldNeuroPapers

Here's bit from #Freud's \(\Phi, \Psi, \Omega\) Project of 1895. At a time when Freud was still a working neurologist he produced a corpus of far-reaching speculation about neural architecture, work he later suppressed, not published until 1954, but heralding themes in realms as diverse as #Cybernetics and #ObjectRelationsTheory.

• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2013/11/11/what-weve-got-here-is-a-failure-to-communicate-4/

#Anticipation #Disappointment #Expectation
#Hallucination #Imagination #Satisfaction
#Abduction #Hypothesis #Prediction

Me: Now that Twitter is crashing and burning I can spend less time on my phone!

Also me: *reading #OldNeuroPapers at 5:30am*

Love so much the #OldNeuroPapers initiative suggested by @NicoleCRust

Here is my contribution. I'm sorry but it's a very recent one ;)) @PessoaBrain

Berker, E. A., Berker, A. H., & Smith, A. (1986). Archives of Neurology, 43(10), 1065–1072.
https://doi.org/10.1001/archneur.1986.00520100069017

Gold mine for references and quotes illuminating on the social-scientific context at the time of Broca.

The quote unveils a dark plot twist on how Tan became famous.

#neuroscience #history

Following the #OldNeuroPapers initiative started by @NicoleCRust , I’m sharing one of the papers that inspired me to choose the topic of my PhD:
Sensitivity of Neurones in Aplysia to Temporal Pattern of Arriving Impulses (1963)
https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/40/4/643/20977/Sensitivity-Of-Neurones-In-Aplysia-to-Temporal
“This investigation was designed to evaluate whether timing should be considered in an analysis of integrated nervous function”
In this beautiful work, Segundo and collaborators explore the effect of interval timing in the neuronal dynamics of Aplysia isolated ganglia. Of special interest for me is that they explored beyond the milliseconds regime and explored the impact of the interval in the seconds scale.
The discussion is beautiful, includes multiple hypothesis and suggested models and covers possible cellular and circuitry mechanisms to explain such temporal dependency.
Enjoy the read!

#OldNeuroPapers #neuroscience #activesensing Microsaccades (outside of a coterie of researchers) are most often treated (and taken to be facts) by the larger neuroscience community as either "involuntary", "random", "fixational artifact", all to the end that they serve no functional purpose. While termed micro-saccades, the typical view is that they are distinct from and nothing like regular eye movements (saccades). However as far back as 1965, Zuber, Stark and Cook, publishing in Science suggest that they are indeed "micro" saccades: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5855207/ They write in the abstract: "... these movements are produced by a common physiological system, or the characteristics of the movements are determined by a single dynamically limiting element." which later, researchers like Hafed, Krauzlis, Martinez-Conde and others have experimentally shown have their neural origins in the superior colliculus or the frontal eye fields much like saccades. What purpose does such a delineation then serve? And even worse, treat them as artifacts instead of as important behavioral signatures/markers? After all, isn't one of the brain's functions to ensure that the body/organism moves and behaves in the environment?