Neuroscience
| Neuroscientists working at the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme and at the Salk Institute reveal that neurons in the basal ganglia can signal the concatenation of individual elements into a behavioral sequence. |
When you learn how to play the piano, first you have to learn notes, scales and chords and only then will you be able to play a piece of music. The same principle applies to speech and to reading, where instead of scales you have to learn the alphabet and the rules of grammar. Or in the case of mathematics, where you might use a set of sequences on a scientific calculator.
But how do separate small elements come together to become a unique and meaningful sequence?
It has been shown that a specific area of the brain, the basal ganglia, is implicated in a mechanism called chunking, which allows the brain to efficiently organised memories and actions. Until now little was known about how this mechanism is implemented in the brain.
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Costa has worked with Dr. Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University for his postdoctoral training, where he established multi-site neuronal recordings in behaving mice to investigate mechanisms of action generation and skill learning.
"We trained mice to perform gradually faster sequences of lever presses, similar to a person who is learning to play a piano piece at an increasingly fast pace." explains Rui Costa. "By recording the neural activity in the basal ganglia during this task we found neurons that seem to treat a whole sequence of actions as a single behaviour."
The basal ganglia encompass two major pathways, the direct and the indirect pathways. The authors found that although activity in these pathways was similar during the initiation of movement, it was rather different during the execution of a behavioural sequence.
"The basal ganglia and these pathways are absolutely crucial for the execution of actions. These circuits are affected in neural disorders, such as Parkinson or Huntington's disease, in which learning of action sequences is impaired", adds Xin Jin.
The work published in this article "is just the beginning of the story", says Rui Costa. The Neurobiology of Action laboratory at the CNP, a group of around 20 researchers headed by Rui Costa, will continue to study the functional organisation of the basal ganglia during learning and execution of action sequences.
Earlier this year, Costa was awarded a 2 million euro Consolidation Grant by the European Research Council to study the mechanism of chunking.
SOURCE Champalimaud Foundation
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