The latest preprint from the Hansel lab at UChicago. My excellent grad colleague Abby Silbaugh shows that activating a supervisory signal local to the cerebellum can, via thalamus, influence whisker stim-induced plasticity in mouse S1. A fantastic demo that the brain + its plasticity is distributed!

This preprint suggests the cerebellum instructs neocortical plasticity via the thalamus: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Very cool if this holds, a really important finding! I've said it before and I'll say it again: plasticity in the brain is less "local" than most people think. 🧠📈 🧪

Inspired by Cajal, the Hansel lab’s new work in @eLife provides a comparative histological analysis of human and mouse Purkinje cell morphology. Following our 2023 study, we detail differences of scale and kind between the neurons of the two species 🧵⬇️ elifesciences.org/articles/105...

Human neurons are incredibly complex and Purkinje cells are, by far, the largest in our brain. We give a detailed characterization of their dendrite and spine morphology and distribution across cerebellar regions compared with mouse. Check it out!

For my first blue post, a blue Purkinje cell! This cell was loaded with dye during whole cell patch clamp in sliced mouse tissue, and oops, some dye spilled out on the granule cells below during the approach...