Today has been a good day. It got off to a late start as the first plenary lecture had to be cancelled (I heard Barry Dickson is in the hospital, I hope you are OK Barry!) and on top of that I had forgotten to switch my phone (my alarm clock) back from quiet so I overslept
I looked at some nice Aplysia buccal ganglion posters. One was from Romuald Nargeot from Bordeaux, France. He showed how a behavior-initiating neuron becomes stereotyped with operant learning. Before training, this neuron kicks off feeding behaviors in a highly irregular manner. Training then changes the biophysical properties of that neuron such that it starts to generate rythmic, stereotypical activity. This is really very neat because it dovetails nicely with our results that this kind of operant learning is akin to habit formation and compulsive behavior. Another Aplysia poster was from the lab of a really all around great guy, Mark Miller. One of the posters was about how neurons controlling the same component of feeding behavior appear to be electrically coupled. The hotly debated concept of the 'modular' organization of brains immediately comes to mind when one thinks of neurons who control the same thing coupling together. I honestly have no idea what the recruitment strategy of Mark is, but from my perspective he is at least doing one thing right. He always manages to have the most beautiful female graduate students at the posters (or are all girls in Puerto Rico so beautiful?)...
In the afternoon we attended a very stimulating symposium organized by David Glanzman promoting zebrafish as a model for behavioral neuroscience. I can only support that model as I have been working with these great little fishes for a short while as an undergraduate student. I could also imagine myself starting tot work on zebrafish if I had the opportunity to test out some ideas I have about operantly ocnditioning them.
Finally, I had a look at another great poster from Bordeaux in France. This one was in rats and compared drug-induced and food-induced memory processes. Unfortunately, there was nobody at the poster when I was there, but what I understood was that drugs of abuse somehow bypass hippocampal learning processes and instead directly kick off modifications in the striatum (a structure which has long been implied in habit formation). This fits very nicely with our hypothesis that fact-learning (or environmental or classical learning) inhibits operant habit learning, which leads to a shallower learning curve for habit formation. We can remove the environmental cues and get fast habit formation in flies. This poster seems to suggest that in rats, drugs of abuse get rid of a similar inhibition by bypassing the structures which inhibit habit formation when food rewards are used.
So this definitely was a good day so far. Let's see how the buffet dinner will be tonight and what tomorrow will bring. Tomorrow is already bound to be an exciting day because of our symposium