Week 5

Of the two papers this week, I enjoyed reading the 2008 Herry et. al paper by far. Having some knowledge of the concepts of extinction and conditioning and the fear circuit aided in my comprehension of the Herry paper, and overall I found it to be very clear and concise. I additionally appreciated how the experiments in the Herry paper clearly followed a logical procession. However, I struggled to understand the 2014 Courtin et. al paper and found it significantly more challenging than papers previously discussed in this class. As many of my peers have addressed, the concept of theta firing and phase resetting was extremely confusing. I had no prior knowledge of this subject, so I have some questions regarding this concept: what exactly is the significance of phase resetting and synchronized firing, and in what other processes is theta firing specifically involved? While I understand the authors likely assumed the readers would have background information regarding the paper’s more abstract topics, I would have appreciated if the authors had elaborated on and reminded its readers of the significance of each finding and its relevance to the original hypothesis. I also recognize that some additional research would help me better appreciate this paper, but after analyzing the research I am still feeling perplexed and overwhelmed by these concepts.

I found the clinical applications of these findings to be exciting because the fear circuit is so heavily involved in psychiatric disorders like PTSD and phobias. Exposure therapy is already one important therapeutic application involving extinction of a fear response that employs repeated exposure to diminish the original fear response. It would be interesting if therapies using optogenetics or electrophysiology could eventually target fear and extinction neurons specifically, either to suppress the exaggerated fear neurons’ response seen in psychiatric patients or enhance the extinction neurons’ activity.