Question: What information do you get from messing with mice?

Martha Havenith answered on 17 Jun 2015:

Hey guys,
the question I am looking at is what is the language that neurons use to communicate information? In my case, information about the visual world. The problem is that for example, in the visual part of the brain there is a lot of neuron activity going on all the time, and in some way or other it is related to things the animal sees. That doesn’t mean that all of it is important though. Take human language – if someone took a sentence and scrambled all the letters in it, we wouldn’t be able to understand it. But if they took out, say, every second letter, or simply reversed the sentence, or wrote it in smaller or bigger letters, we might still be able to get the meaning. That tells us something about how human grammar works.
I’m doing something similar for ‘neuron language’ – I use a virus to make the neurons sensitive to light so I can add or subtract small bits of their activity, or give it a different rhythm. And because the mice are doing a visual task at the same time, trying to see differences between pretty similar visual targets, I can find out if those small changes in neuron activity make it easier or harder for the mice to see the targets. That tells me about what bits of the neuronal activity patterns are necessary to ‘pass on the message’ about the visual target – so hopefully I’ll be able to understand over time what the grammar is that the neurons use.