Week 5

During my first co-op I worked as a behavioral therapist serving children with autism and other behavioral disorders. After that experience I have always had an interest in the neuronal processes and brain activity that occurs during events such as reinforcement, punishment and extinction. The 2008 paper was helpful in starting to answer some of the questions I had in regards to the neural networks responsible for these behaviors and occurrences. The Courtin et al. paper was interesting to me because during my second co-op my project involved optogenetic manipulation of parvalbumin interneurons in the visual cortex in mice. While reading relevant literature, I learned that these interneurons had differential and specific roles depending on their location in the cortex. Though interesting, I found the Courtin paper heavy in electrophysiology, which is not my strong suit, so my discussion focus is for the Herry paper.

Unfortunately, I had a difficult time comprehending many of this week’s figures and the discussion of the theta waves/theta resetting. I’ve come across this confusion before, but I still have yet to grasp the implications of the different waveforms on brain activity and neuronal function. I found the 2008 paper the easier of the two to read and get through. I had never taken the time to consider that extinction would be controlled by a distinct population of neurons whose activity opposed a population of fear neurons. I really liked how they addressed the question of whether the extinction and fear neurons could reverse roles – while it’s important to use controls and determine whether the populations were functionally distinct, it was phrased in a way which wouldn’t have immediately come to my mind. I found the flow of the paper as natural, the results of each experiment posed new questions that were addressed in the consequent experiments. This paper absolutely helped me begin to understand the neural mechanisms that are responsible, in part, for extinction.