Latent dynamics of primary sensory cortical population activity structured by fluctuations in the local field potential.

Introduction: As emerging technologies enable measurement of precise details of the activity within microcircuits at ever-increasing scales, there is a growing need to identify the salient features and patterns within the neural populations that represent physiologically and behaviorally relevant aspects of the network. Accumulating evidence from recordings of large neural populations suggests that neural population activity frequently exhibits relatively low-dimensional structure, with a small number of variables explaining a substantial fraction of the structure of the activity. While such structure has been observed across the brain, it is not known how reduced-dimension representations of neural population activity relate to classical metrics of "brain state," typically described in terms of fluctuations in the local field potential (LFP), single-cell activity, and behavioral metrics.

Extensivist: improving the delivery of enhanced health in older people's care homes.

Background: Older people living in care homes are often frail and clinically complex. The Enhanced Health in Care Homes (EHCH) framework supports organisational and clinical strategies to deliver good care, promoting proactive person-centred care by whole system collaboration. We evaluate the impact of a new role, the Extensivist, in the delivery of EHCH for older people living in care homes.

MULTIPLE DISTINCT TIMESCALES OF RAPID SENSORY ADAPATION IN THE THALAMOCORTICAL CIRCUIT.

Numerous studies have shown that neuronal representations in sensory pathways are far from static but are instead strongly shaped by the complex properties of the sensory inputs they receive. Adaptation dynamically shapes the neural signaling that underlies our perception of the world yet remains poorly understood. We investigated rapid adaptation across timescales from hundreds of milliseconds to seconds through simultaneous multi-electrode recordings from the ventro-posteromedial nucleus of the thalamus (VPm) and layer 4 of the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) in male and female anesthetized mice in response to controlled, persistent whisker stimulation.

Spike Reliability is Cell-Type Specific and Shapes Excitation and Inhibition in the Cortex.

Neurons encode information in the highly variable spiking activity of neuronal populations, so that different repetitions of the same stimulus can generate action potentials that vary significantly in terms of the count and timing. How does spiking variability originate, and does it have a functional purpose? Leveraging the Allen Institute cell types dataset, we relate the spiking reliability of cortical neurons during the intracellular injection of current resembling synaptic inputs to their morphologic, electrophysiologic, and transcriptomic classes. Our findings demonstrate that parvalbumin+ (PV) interneurons, a subclass of inhibitory neurons, show high reliability compared to other neuronal subclasses, particularly excitatory neurons.