Tag Archives: optogenetics

Hearing the light: Improved frequency resolution of optical vs. electrical inner ear stimulation

Auditory signals, including human speech, are characterized by many features, one important being sound frequency, which is perceived as pitch. In normal hearing people, the cochlea in the inner ear translates different sound frequencies into neural activation

More than just a reward molecule, dopamine helps us avoid harm

It is well known that the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system guides behavior as animals seek rewards from their environment. During the pursuit of reward, subsecond dopamine release events within this pathway represent information related to the rewarding outcome

Sugar consumption can be reduced by tonic activation of dopamine reward pathway

Rewarding ( pleasurable ) and aversive events give us dissimilar perceptions, which powerfully shape our decisions and therefore behavioral outcomes. In fact, chemical changes, which take place in our brain, are very different under these opposite circumstances.

Light-controlled muscle-powered walking biological robots

For centuries, engineers have built with traditional materials, such as woods or metals, which can’t dynamically respond to changes in their environment. Intuitively, we know that biological materials can do things synthetic materials cannot. For example, our

Septo-hippocampal signal processing

If we are ultimately to uncover how the brain encodes the information about the surrounding environment it is necessary to understand how the spatial signals are being processed and regulated. The hippocampal region plays a crucial role