=<font color="blue">'''This Week - 22 October 2021 (9:30 a.m., via Zoom)'''</font>=
+
=<font color="blue">'''Summer break - The ICLM journal club will be back in October'''</font>=
   −
<u>Speaker:</u> '''Melissa Sharpe'''
+
<u>Speaker:</u>  
   −
<u>Title: </u> ''' “ Past Experience Shapes the Neural Circuits Required for Future Learning ” '''
+
<u>Title:</u>  
   −
<u>Abstract:</u>   Experimental research controls for past experience yet prior experience influences how we learn. Here, we tested whether we could recruit a neural population that usually encodes rewards to encode aversive events. Specifically, we found that GABAergic neurons in the lateral hypothalamus (LH) were not involved in learning about fear in naïve rats. However, if these rats had prior experience with rewards, LH GABAergic neurons became important for learning about fear. Interestingly, inhibition of these neurons paradoxically enhanced learning about neutral sensory information, regardless of prior experience, suggesting that LH GABA neurons normally oppose learning about irrelevant information. These experiments suggest that prior experience shapes the neural circuits recruited for future learning in a highly specific manner, reopening the neural boundaries we have drawn for learning of particular types of information from work in naïve subjects. For example, at UCLA, we are now investigating how the recruitment of LH GABA neurons to encode fear memories impacts on the relevance of traditional fear circuits in these memories, including the basolateral amygdala.
+
<u>Summary:</u>
   −
<u>Relevant Papers:</u> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-020-00791-4
+
<u>Relevant Paper:</u>
    
='''About Us'''=
 
='''About Us'''=
 
Current Organizers:
 
Current Organizers: