Publications by authors named "Matthew N Van De Poll"
Article Synopsis
- General anesthetics, like propofol and isoflurane, disrupt brain activity by enhancing inhibition and blocking neurotransmitter release at certain synapses.
- Research focused on how isoflurane affects different neurotransmitter systems showed that it mainly impaired the release of neurotransmitters at excitatory cholinergic synapses.
- In contrast, isoflurane had minimal impact on inhibitory GABAergic and glutamatergic synapses, indicating a selective inhibitory effect in the brain during general anesthesia.
Article Synopsis
- Researchers have used electroencephalograms to identify sleep stages in humans and mammals, but this method isn't applicable to invertebrates like flies.
- The study involved long-term recordings of local brain activity in flies during sleep, revealing distinct sleep stages through machine learning analysis.
- Key findings show that certain sleep stages correspond with specific behaviors (like rhythmic proboscis extensions), and the brain's activity patterns are different between sleep and wakefulness during these behaviors.
Article Synopsis
- Sleep is common in most animals, indicating it serves important biological functions, but the exact purpose of sleep remains unclear due to its complexity across species.
- Researchers studied the brain activity of flies during spontaneous sleep using long-term multichannel local field potential (LFP) recordings, which allowed them to analyze differences between sleep and wake states.
- Using machine learning, they identified unique sleep stages in flies and discovered specific brain activity patterns linked to micro-behaviors, revealing that some behaviors, like rhythmic proboscis extensions, have distinct brain state correlates when asleep compared to when awake.
Balancing Prediction and Surprise: A Role for Active Sleep at the Dawn of Consciousness?
Front Syst Neurosci
November 2021
The brain is a prediction machine. Yet the world is never entirely predictable, for any animal. Unexpected events are surprising, and this typically evokes prediction error signatures in mammalian brains.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClosed-loop paradigms provide an effective approach for studying visual choice behaviour and attention in small animals. Different flying and walking paradigms have been developed to investigate behavioural and neuronal responses to competing stimuli in insects such as bees and flies. However, the variety of stimulus choices that can be presented over one experiment is often limited.
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