Herry & Courtin

I got the overall point of the Herry et al. paper, the questions being asked, the methods by which the questions would be answered, and the overall conclusions. However, I couldn’t make sense of a bunch of the figures. Obviously, I knew that figures regarding neuronal activation and how it switches between the fear and extinction neuronal sets were being presented but I often couldn’t quite see how. Right off the bat, the raster plots and histograms through me off and it didn’t get any better from that point on as I couldn’t figure out what the z-score plots were showing. 

Although I had a hard time with the figures, I liked this paper mostly because I agreed with their thought progression. They start off showing the relation between BA neurons and fear and extinction then talk about how the two sets of neurons are different but share the same space and then move on to talk about the circuits these neurons are involved in and how they overlap or don’t overlap in terms of the mPFC and vHip, respectively. They then go on to show necessity of the BA neurons for behavioral changes through inactivation. Overall, I thought this was a well put together paper and I will likely appreciate it even more one I know what all the figures mean.

In terms of the Courtin et al. paper, all I got from it is that they are inhibiting certain neurons and this affect fear expression somehow. Outside of that, I don't know what is going on. I can’t really piece together the big picture of the paper as they just seem to jump right in to their data, or at least it feels that way to me. I definitely have a knowledge void in terms of the details of their experiments. I thought the figures would help, as they tend to do in papers that make sense but, well, they didn’t.