The Allen Institute for Brain Science has just launched projects to investigate this and three other key research questions. This research is conducted via OpenScope, a shared neuroscience observatory that lets neuroscientists worldwide propose and direct experiments on the Allen Brain Observatory. This research is made freely available to anyone tackling open questions in neural activity in health and disease. 

Psychedelic science

One of this year’s OpenScope projects will explore how psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in “magic mushrooms,” can induce intense psychedelic experiences in humans, changing brain activity at a cellular level.

Using advanced recording techniques in mice, scientists will investigate the neural mechanisms that underlie altered cognition and perception, and observe how neurons communicate differently under the influence of psilocybin. They will also explore how those changes might influence the brain’s ability to process and predict sensory information, which is crucial to understanding how perception is constructed.

“Our interest in these compounds goes beyond their potential clinical applications,” said Roberto de Filippo, Ph.D., a postdoc at Humboldt University of Berlin, in a statement. “We believe that uncovering the biological mechanisms underlying their effects can provide fundamental insights into the processes that govern perception, cognition, and consciousness itself.”

How the past subtly shapes our worldview

Another 2024 OpenScope project aims to uncover the neural underpinnings of these updates. How does the brain recognize objects moving around us? The project aims to demystify this fundamental process by studying motion perception in the visual cortex of mice. This project will use microscopy to simultaneously observe the activity of many neurons over several weeks and in different parts of the visual cortex.

Seeing the patterns

Our brains instantly recognize countless complex visual textures that surround us, from the intricate designs on a butterfly’s wings to the grain pattern of wood. But how does it pull off this remarkable feat of visual perception? In this OpenScope project, mice will be trained to distinguish textures while their neuronal activity is monitored in the visual cortex, linking neural responses to perception.

The key goals are to determine how certain textures are easily recognized while others pose a challenge and to map how different brain regions interact to transform visual inputs into coherent representations that guide behavior.

Those findings could uncover core principles for how the brain extracts understanding from our richly patterned visual world, the researchers said. However, the scale and complexity of the research necessitate tools and resources beyond those in a typical laboratory setting.

“Using the Allen Brain Observatory will not only increase the scope and reach of our project severalfold, but it will also allow us to compare and contextualize with all the other Open Science projects they have led in the last decade,” said Federico Bolaños, Ph.D., lead data scientist at the University of British Columbia. “As it happened in other fields like high energy physics or astronomy, research in systems neuroscience needs to move from individual laboratories into a bigger and interconnected community, in which we progress together.”

The Research described here was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health.

Let us know your thoughts! Sign up for a Mindplex account now, join our Telegram, or follow us on Twitter.