Future research topics

Herry et al.’s paper from this week very much stood out to me for its complex detail and interesting approach. I found that this paper may have been easier for me to read than other papers used previously since I have become familiar with the drugs (ie. muscimol) and now that we have been talking about the physiological methods in more depth. I think that with the mix of pharmacological activations/ inactivations with electrophysiological recordings I tend to understand and agree with the findings more, and this one is not very different. The paper mostly explained the sufficiency and necessity of the BA and discovering the specificity of onset of physiological change vs phenotypic expression of behavior which I thought was on one side, expected, but on another, a very interesting discovery. What I was interested in most was the change-point point paradigm and the applications for the future of that. The idea that we are able to find markers of extinction before extinction happens made me question the potential other experiments that could follow- but I will revisit that idea after discussing Reznikov et al.

            With Reznikov, something that I’ve noticed with the Journal of Psychiatric Research is the “short but sweet” nature of the papers. Easily read, this paper is short yet packed and very easily understood. What I appreciated with this paper, like Herry et al.’s paper is the future applications brought up by the authors. Regarding figure 5, I was very interested with the fact that the weak-extinction group had significantly lower plasma corticosterone levels even before any fear conditioning. Immediately I began thinking of the possibilities of early intervention with something like optogenetics and the comparison between early adolescence intervention of higher coricosterone and later in life intervention. I wondered if there would be any difference between the more juvenile rats being exposed to corticosterone and how their extinction would differ especially since in early life stress there is a tendency for negative effects to happen when there is high level of stress hormone in the body.

            Keeping with the optogenetic interventions, I think it would also be interesting to see how changing the change-point neuronal activity would change the outcomes, perhaps inducing earlier but more robust changes to the activity.