Week 3

      I really enjoyed this week's readings. I found the writing to be clear, concise and I feel that I can get behind the results each paper provides. I also found reading about the continuation of the research a great way to see the development of this topic. The hippocampus is an interesting brain region to me and I was excited to read about the experiments performed.
      In the 2013 paper I was able to grasp the concepts of the paradigm and results rather quickly, which isn't always the case for me when I read scientific papers. I did note that the animals were anesthetized, causing me to wonder whether there would be any changes in non-anesthetized animals. I've read a few papers whose sole purpose is to repeat previous experiments in non-anesthetized animals and some have found altered results. One part of their discussion that confused me was towards the end where they claimed to be able to look at false and genuine memories at different stages in the memory process - I'm not quite sure if I understood in the figures/paper where they were able to pull this claim from and personally think there needs to be a little more support for this statement.
     What I found most interesting was the difference between the DG and CA1 results. I was not surprised that only DG stimulation of A-active cells increased context-dependent freezing, rather I would have been surprised if CA1 stimulation produced the same. My understanding is that while they may share some similar functions, the DG and CA1 contribute to different steps in memory and emotional processing. I think that the results provided in the paper give important insight to the role of the DG as well as possibilities for therapeutic advancements. Future experiments could include replications of this paper but looking at area CA3, as well as using retrograde and anterograde viruses to look at changes in projection activity from the DG to the other areas of the hippocampus
     I appreciated that the 2015 expanded the concepts of the first while simultaneously tying back to depression and a little bit of neurogenesis. My primary, and for now brief, discussion point with this paper is noticing that there were differential results with the mPFC which we previously saw in week 2's papers. The mPFC seemingly is playing a distinct role in depressive phenotypes and recovery which makes me want to do some more research on what has been determined about its involvement and what makes it different than the other areas in these experiments.