Week 5

These weeks papers were significantly more difficult to read and understand compared to previous weeks’ papers. Maybe this had to do with my lack of knowledge on neuronal activity, reading spikes, or understanding theta oscillations, but I have been left perplexed by these articles. I thought after talking at length about fear conditioning, extinction, and renewal I would have had a better foundation for these papers but I still was at a loss. I am glad that I had at least the experimental designs down and packed but unfortunately got lost with the actual results and data collected in both papers.  The Herry et al. paper was easier to follow as they provided more detail on exactly what they were studying, how they studied it, and why the results supported their hypothesis. I think something interesting that they can also test is the circuit between the Prefrontal Cortex, Intercalated Cell Masses, and extinction neurons in the BLA. Since Intercalated Cell Masses inhibit fear neurons, they could also have a role in changing behavioral states during fear extinction and renewal. What I liked most about this paper is that the experiments seemed to build off each other. First, they looked for which neurons were encoded in fear conditioning, extinction, and renewal. Once they found these neurons, they questioned when are these neurons activated in relation to behavioral changes. They also tested different paradigms and location of the fear and extinction neurons in relation to activity. What I thought was the most interesting experiment was testing necessity of the BA in fear extinction. As for the Courtin et al. paper, I really hope the presenters in class tomorrow and Professor Shansky can go through this one slowly as I really do not understand it after reading through a couple of times. I thought this would be the easier paper to follow because they use optogenetics but I had a lot of difficulty with it.