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News article about Antonio’s study in Scientific American by Simon Makin Specific patterns of brain activity are thought to underlie specific processes or computations important for various mental faculties, such as memory. One such “brain signal” that has received a lot of attention recently is known as a “sharp wave ripple”—a short, wave-shaped burst of high-frequency oscillations. Researchers originally identified ripples in the hippocampus, a region crucially involved in memory and [...]

In June of 2007, Albert Tsao, a nineteen-year-old native of Silver Spring, Maryland, was working in Trondheim, Norway, at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience. Tsao was a summer intern in the lab of May-Britt and Edvard Moser, married researchers who were well known in neurobiology circles for discovering “grid cells”—neurons that, by tracking our position, create a navigational map in the brain. Grid cells are located in an area of the brain [...]

The hippocampus constructs a map of the environment. How this “cognitive map” is utilized by other brain regions to guide behavior remains unexplored. To examine how neuronal firing patterns in the hippocampus are transmitted and transformed, we recorded neurons in its principal subcortical target, the lateral septum (LS). We observed that LS neurons carry reliable spatial information in the phase of action potentials, relative to hippocampal theta oscillations, while the firing rates of LS neurons remained uninformative. Furthermore, [...]

Conditioned place preference (CPP) is a widely used model of addiction-related behavior whose underlying mechanisms are not understood. In this study, we used dual site silicon probe recordings in freely moving mice to examine interactions between the hippocampus and nucleus accumbens in cocaine CPP. We found that CPP was associated with recruitment of D2-positive nucleus accumbens medium spiny neurons to fire in the cocaine-paired location, and this recruitment was driven predominantly by selective strengthening [...]