Lecture 8

Specialized Cell types

1. Place cells – fires when you come back to an area that is familiar, based on the
environmental factors. It is found in the hippocampus.
2. Grid cells – forms a triangular grid-like firing pattern which covers the entire 2D
space. It is found in the entorhinal cortex.
3. Boundary cells – fires based on the boundaries defining where the object is e.g. walls
around the object. It if found in the endorhinal cortex.
4. Head direction cells – fire more frequently based on the direction of the person’s
head e.g. one region of cells fires if facing north compared to facing south. It is found
in the endorhinal cortex
5. Conjunctive cells – combines the activities of grid cells and head direction cells i.e.
gives a map based on the direction of the head to help with better navigation. It is
found in the entorhinal cortex.

In vivo recording
 Science sombrero
o Used to record brain activity.
o Requires a surgery to add in wires.
o “Sombrero” is used to protect the wires from rat and help give it freer
movement.
 Records LFP, which is a collective recording of all the brain activity.
 Can also record single cells: requires closer readings.
 Multi-channel drive with upwards of 32 channels.
o Each channels can record many different cells at once.
 Tetrodes can be placed at various brain regions.
o Bundle of wires that are thinner than a human hair.
o When placed, cell activity is compared from each wire in relation to the
relative distance of these cells from the wires.
o Relative strengths help to compare electrical impulses among cells and
decide which cell (among a larger group of cells) actually fired.

Organization of parahippocampal network

Pattern Completion
 CA3 has a small number of cells
o Has dense cell connetions that get stringer and weaker based on experiences
 Recurrent connectivity
 CA1 sets up the various components to unify memory

Memory
 Patient H.M.
o Had his hippocampus removed due to epileptic seizures
o Unable to form new memories
 Could still remember childhood memories
 2 Types
o Short Term Memory – 20 seconds
o Long Term Memory
 Declarative Memory (“Explicit Memory”) – Found in the hippocampus
and cortex
 Semantic: Facts and stories about our life
 Episodic: Events that occur within you own life
  Procedural Memory – found in the basal ganglia, cerebellum and
motor cortex
 Skills
 Habits
 Unconscious patterns
 Human Tasks for testing different types of memory
o Star Task
 Must draw a star shape, but cannot see the paper directly. Instead,
the person can only see a reflection
 Tests Procedural Memory
 H.M. could still percorm these tasks, indicating that this meory was
unimpaired.
o Free Recall
 Tests Working Memory
o N-Back Test
 Presented with series of letter, where you must indicate if its a repeat
(n units infront)
 Usually
 Animal Tasks for testing different types of memory
o T-maze
 Rodent must alternate between paths
 Working Memory
o Radial arm maze
 Treat is placed at the end and rodents must visit each arm only once
 When a hippocampus lesion is induces, the animal cannot
differentiate between different arms and revisits each arm multiple
times
o Morris water maze
 Rodent is placed in water
 Hebbian Learning
o Proposed by Donald Hebb
o “Neurons that fire together wire together”
 Another way of maintaining connections between axons and
dendrites
 Must occur quickly (within 40 ms of one another) to make stronger
connections
o Synaptic Plasticity
PreLab 8
 Modelling single cells and networks
o These models are more mechanically based
o Can behave mechanically
o The cell body is one compartment
o
o These parts can behave realistically
 Review on model Code
o Parameters and model design
 Parameters: rate of habituation, time at which stimulation occurs, length of
simulation
 Other parameters for model design: number of cells, which cells are
connected, how strong are the connections
o Time vector & variable
 tEnd & tstop describe the length of simulation
 vector (list’/array) that shows all time steps in the simulation
 variable that holds the current time (usually ‘t’)
o Inputs
 Describes the stimulation or activation provided to the model (e.g. sea slug)
o Outputs
 The spike times of each cell in the model, the membrane potential of the
units in the model
 Classes and Instances
o Class: defines the properties of the object
o Objects: specific instances of a class; they have all the properties of the class and the
properties of individual objects can be changed independent of the class
o Syntax:
 Class NameOfClass():
 Def_init_(self):
o Self.color = ‘red’
 NewInstance = NameofClass()
 NewInstance.color = ‘blue’
o Note: Do all the PyCharm tutorials, use Justin Lee’s guide and visit Stack Exchange
 Biological Goal
o Understand the concept of biological neural networks with distinct cells connected
by synapses
o Appreciate how the shapes of neurons and how there conductivities can change
 Create a small compartmental model in Neuron
o Follow the tutorial on the neuron website to create a ball stick model
o Next, make a calss of this type
o Make instances of this class
 Build a network
 o Create multiple instances of the cell and connect them together
 Background on modelling
o G = gmax*[-e^(-t/tauR) + e^(-1/tauD)
o I = g*(v – Esyn)
o NEURON has predefined synapses such as ExpSyn
 Create synapse objects and connect them to the pre- and post-synaptic cells
 Create 2 types of output
o Membrane potential from individual cells
o Spike times of all cells in the network
 Cells number (Cell 1, 2, 3, 4....) is y axis
 When the spike happens (with unit time) is the x axis
 Differences between NEURON and Python
o Stimulation provided will be more intuitive
o You wont need to create a for loop i.e. you can instead use a run command
o And more.....
