Special brain cells respond to unexpected situations
Neuroscientist Koen Seignette and his colleagues investigated the predictive capacity of the brain. How do different types of brain cells respond to expected and unexpected visual stimuli, and how does this depend on experience with the different stimuli?
The neuroscientists saw that different types of brain cells, including chandelier cells, respond to unexpected visual information. For example, think of seeing a new building on the way to work. The activity of these cells depends on the extent to which we are familiar with the visual stimuli shown. The more often we have seen the building, the less strongly these cells respond. These and other types of brain cells then also respond to the absence of visual information that was expected, such as a building that has suddenly been demolished.
Our brain continuously tries to predict the world around us. Many of these predictions are learned, for example which buildings we expect to see on the way to work, or which objects we expect to see in our living room. The research helps us to better understand which brain cells are involved in the learning process to form our expectations. This is important to better understand problems with learning processes and our predictive abilities. For example in schizophrenia, where it is thought that patients sometimes have problems with the predictive abilities of their brain, making it harder for them to distinguish between reality and internally generated information or predictions.
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