June 13, 2014

Clever Suppression in the Brain




Diversity of inhibiting nerve cells allows for more complex information processing

The hippocampus is a small structure in the brains of mammals that plays a crucial role in processing input from our senses and allows perceptions to be stored as memories. Nerve cells that inhibit the activity of other cells have now been shown to play a much larger and more complex role in these processes than previously assumed. Teams led by Prof. Dr. Marlene Bartos from the Cluster of Excellence BrainLinks-BrainTools at the University of Freiburg and Prof. Dr. Imre Vida from the Cluster of Excellence NeuroCure at the hospital Charité in Berlin report these findings in the current issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.