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It has been widely believed that a key function of sleep is to actively clear metabolites and toxins from the brain. Miao, Luo et al. show in mice that brain clearance is markedly reduced—not increased—during sleep and anesthesia.
Physiologically relevant stimulation of dopamine neurons does not function as a reward and does not endow cues with a reward representation. However, high-frequency stimulation is represented as a sensory-specific goal that motivates behavior.
Muller et al. show that some neurons in the cortex learn faster from better-than-expected outcomes compared to worse-than-expected ones; others do the converse, resulting in simultaneous optimism and pessimism, as predicted by distributional reinforcement learning.
In this study the authors show that in the mouse anterior thalamus, the activity of head-direction cells is selectively modulated by sensory stimuli and by the animal’s behavioral state.
