McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2011 Oct;21(5):693-700. doi: 10.1016/j.conb.2011.06.010. Epub 2011 Jul 15.
Where are the 'prime movers' that control behavior? Which circuits in the brain control the order in which individual motor gestures of a learned behavior are generated, and the speed at which they progress? Here we describe two techniques recently applied to localizing and characterizing the circuitry underlying the generation of vocal sequences in the songbird. The first utilizes small, localized, temperature changes in the brain to perturb the speed of neural dynamics. The second utilizes intracellular manipulation of membrane potential in the freely behaving animal to perturb the dynamics within a single neuron. Both of these techniques are broadly applicable in behaving animals to test hypotheses about the biophysical and circuit dynamics that allow neural circuits to march from one state to the next.
控制行为的“原动者”在哪里？大脑中的哪些回路控制习得行为的单个运动手势的产生顺序，以及它们的进展速度？在这里，我们描述了最近应用于定位和描述鸟类鸣叫序列产生的基础回路的两种技术。第一种技术利用大脑中局部、小范围的温度变化来扰乱神经动力学的速度。第二种技术利用自由行为动物中胞内膜电位的操纵来扰乱单个神经元内的动力学。这两种技术在行为动物中都具有广泛的适用性，可以用来检验关于允许神经回路从一个状态过渡到下一个状态的生物物理和电路动力学的假设。
