ABOVE: An artistic representation of the two brain states—leading to the correct or incorrect choice of directional movement—observed in larval zebrafish during decision-making
ALIPASHA VAZIRI
Understanding the array of neural signals that occur as an organism makes a decision is a challenge. To tackle it, the authors of a study published last week (January 16) in Cell imaged large swaths of the larval zebrafish brain as the animals decided which way to move their tails to avoid an undesirable situation. Finding patterns in the data, they were then able to use imaging to predict—10 seconds in advance—the timing and direction of the fish’s movement.
“In a lot of other model systems it’s really difficult to actually . . . record something that’s happening throughout the whole brain with a high level of precision,” says Kristen Severi, a biologist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who was not involved in ...
