week 5

These papers took on a very interesting topic but were also difficult to comprehend. I find papers that exploring circuitry display the immense intricacy of the brain. I personally saw this especially in Courtin's exploration of synchronization to drive fear expression. Unfortunately, despite being intrigued by the questions both authors were asking and the narrative they were creating, I definitely struggled to grasp much of the content in the paper. There seemed to be an assumption of understanding in the reader and I unfortunately have not come across several of the methods explored in this paper. I am really looking forward to the in-class discussion and  am hoping tomorrow's lesson will fill the missing links and complete these gaps of understanding.

I believe a big question to think about this week is the validity and value of using the classic fear conditioning model as the animal model of choice. All assumptions are made from here. I think this will be an interesting discussion among the class.  I think its interesting to think about in Herry's paper how the extinction neurons are supposed be the neurons of contextualization during fear extinction. Is their activation to US versus the CS enough evidence of their role in the extinction process ? Perhaps with more familiarity with this method of research this would be clear, but although I am convinced they run in a separate circuit than the neurons activating to the CS and not the US, I am still left curious about this assumption. I am also still unsure about their selection and identification of these very small number of neurons. 8-9 neurons just doesn't convince me of much. I liked how in Courtin's paper, to identify their neurons of interest, they first just recorded activity in the area of the BLA, letting the results drive the direction of interest. By identifying the opposite nature of the two subclass of the INs, they were able to further explore the effect of selective inhibition  of the PVIN. To me this a much more convincing method of narrowing down to a few neurons of interest.