Stanford Researchers Learn How Brain Decides What To Decipher

PALO ALTO, CA -- In October's Science journal, researchers believe they're figured out how animals sort through the details. A part of the brain called the paraventricular thalamus, or PVT, serves as a kind of gatekeeper, making sure that the brain identifies and tracks the most salient details of a situation, the Stanford News Service reported.

Although the research, funded in part by the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute’s Neurochoice Initiative, is confined to mice for now, the results could one day help researchers better understand how humans learn or even help treat drug addiction, said senior author Xiaoke Chen, an assistant professor of biology, the News Service adds.

The results are a surprise, Chen said, in part because few had suspected the thalamus could do something so sophisticated.

“We showed thalamic cells play a very important role in keeping track of the behavioral significance of stimuli, which nobody had done before,” said Chen, who is also a member of Stanford Bio-X and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.

In simple terms, learning comes down to feedback.

Case in point, if one has a headache and takes a drug, the medicine is expected to eliminate the headache. People learn from what works and what doesn't. Psychologists and neuroscientists have studied this aspect of learning extensively and even traced it to specific parts of the brain that process feedback and drive learning.

Still, that picture of learning has proven incomplete, Chen said. Even in relatively uncomplicated laboratory experiments, humans and other animals need to figure out what to learn from – essentially, what’s feedback and what’s noise.

To remedy this perplexing problem, Chen and colleagues taught mice to associate particular odors with good and bad outcomes. One odor signaled a sip of water was coming, while another signaled the mouse was about to get a puff of air to the face.

The study reported by Stanford indicates neuroscientists now have a new way to control learning, Chen said.

Those results could point to new ways to modulate learning – in mice, for the time being – by stimulating or suppressing PVT activity as appropriate. They also point, in the long run, to ways to help treat drug addiction, Chen said, by helping addicts unlearn the association between taking a drug and the subsequent high.

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