Zebra finchWIKIMEDIA, PERIPITUSAcute manipulations of specific brain regions can have strikingly different effects than permanent lesions of the same areas, according to a report in Nature today (December 9). The results of the study, in which scientists examined specific behaviors in rats and songbirds, suggest that transient neural stimulations or inactivations may cause off-target behavioral effects that can complicate data interpretation.
“This is a paper that had to be done,” said behavioral neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin who was not involved in the study. “The work is very elegant, very careful, and it shows something that one could definitely suspect . . . but that has never been shown so explicitly: that when we do an acute manipulation of a piece of the brain, you can [also] produce effects at a distance.”
Before the advent of techniques that could reversibly alter brain cell function, such as optogenetic stimulation and pharmacological inactivation, the majority of information about how the brain functioned came from “more than a century of lesion studies,” said Bence Ölveczky of Harvard University. These permanent alterations to specific brain regions revealed ...
