Brain structures communicate through ‘post office’ system

Scientists have achieved a greater understanding of the mammalian brain’s connectivity by showing that the hippocampus—a central information processing hub—sends impulses selectively to different brain areas during particular behaviors. The results of the study, which was carried out in rats, were published in Science.

“This latest result is in line with the idea that there are these preferred pathways for specific information,” said systems neuroscientist Joshua Gordon of Columbia University in New York who was not involved in the work. “It could have been that the hippocampus sent information indiscriminately to downstream structures that then pulled out the information they needed. . . But instead it looks like there is some pre-processing [occurring], where the hippocampus preferentially sends one type of information to one brain region and another type to another brain region,” he added. “That’s really cool.”

“There were, in principle, two possibilities,” said cognitive neurobiologist Thomas Klausberger of the Medical University of Vienna who led the new study. One was that the ventral portion acted “like a radio transmitter,” where all information was broadcast and target areas would “tune into” the information they needed, filtering out the rest, he explained. The other was that it behaved more like a “post office, where information is specifically sent to a specific recipient,” said Klausberger.

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: Targeted Information in the Rat Brain

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