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Even when the events around us are random, it can be hard to resist the temptation to make predictions about upcoming events based on apparent patterns (for instance, betting on black in roulette because the previous five runs have come up black). Gregory McCarthy and colleagues now suggest that the prefrontal cortex is involved in making such moment-to-moment predictions. The authors used functional MRI to image brain activity while subjects viewed random sequences composed of two stimuli and found that prefrontal cortex was activated when a particular stimulus violated an apparent pattern. See pages 394 and 485.
NMDA receptors are important for both normal transmission and pathological damage. New results indicate that receptor location makes the key difference: survival-promoting signals derive from synaptic receptors, whereas a cell-death signal comes from extrasynaptic receptors.
Neurons in primary visual cortex have long been classified into simple and complex cells, but a new paper notes that different firing patterns need not imply different underlying circuitry.
Two reports demonstrate more convincingly than ever that progeny of adult hippocampal stem cells become functional neurons in vitro and integrate into existing circuitry in vivo.