Week 4

Once again I enjoyed the continuity of this week's papers. After reading Han's paper I found myself wondering what about the neurons with increased CREB was influencing their involvement in the fear memories. Yiu et al. performed a range of experiments which did well to address my formed questions and elaborate further on these specific fear memory activated neurons. I found the results in both the papers strongly convincing of the published claims. I thought that the controls performed and included were thorough and more than sufficient in their purpose. Both articles were clear and understandable. Utilized scientific techniques and concepts were appropriately elaborated so that non-experts could more fully grasp the material.

One concept I maybe should be familiar with but find myself still confused about is neuron competition. I understand that properties of neurons contribute to their distinct function and participation in mechanisms/pathways. What I don't quite understand is phrasing this as neuronal "competition". To my [naive] perspective it would seem instinctive that neurons have unique characteristics which allow differential activation in different functions. Wouldn't neurons naturally be created to behave specifically for their intended contributions? Why would they have to "compete"? I feel like I'm not clearly describing why I find "competition" an odd term, but I also believe that that coincides to my shallow understanding of the topic.

For future directions I'd like to see these types of experiments performed on other types of memory. Fear conditioning is a common and useful paradigm which has demonstrated validity in recent years, but there are other memory types which could have a great impact on the scientific understanding of memories and the specific neuron populations that are allocated for these memories. It would be interesting to see whether the neurons with low levels of CREB had an opposite or common memory form that activates them. Exploring the role of excitability in fear memory activation is just the first step which opens many other doors - is there inhibition from these active neurons that helps influences the neuronal competition, as touched upon in Yiu's article? What other properties determine a neuron's role in memory formation of different types? What are the clinical applications of this finding? Last week's papers addressed potential uses for the treatment of depression and I believe there could be similar implications with these latest papers. Utilizing methods, medications and techniques that can alter the excitability of neurons and the potassium currents could have major applications in the future for treating depression or other conditions.