The Story
“How Environmental Generational Amnesia Affects Our Mental Health”
https://www.brainfacts.org/thinking-sensing-and-behaving/thinking-and-awareness/2023/how-environmental-generational-amnesia-affects-our-mental-health-072423
by Robin Tricoles
BrainFacts, July 24, 2023
The Pitch
Lede: While visiting a dog park, neurologist David Schneider revealed to a fellow visitor what he did for a living. Her response: You have the weirdest job in the world.
Schneider’s job at the time entailed determining whether mice know how loud their footfalls are and how they can tell the difference between noise they’re making and noise coming from someone else. Being self-aware means that mice know if they’re attracting unwanted attention, specifically from predators.
Nutgraf: Schneider and his colleagues recently discovered a set of neurons in humans whose sole purpose is to detect self-generated noise, and importantly, detect when a sound doesn’t match the maker’s expectation. Recognizing that something sounds wrong affects how we learn and even whether we develop psychiatric disorders.
Format: A 800-900 word feature story that includes the following sources:
Sources:
Albert Powers, associate professor of psychiatry; Yale PRIME Psychosis Risk Clinic, Psychiatry, Yale University
David Schneider, assistant professor, Center for Neural Science, New York University
Aleena R. Garner, assistant professor of neurobiology, Harvard University.
Here are the titles of the papers that highlight this research:
Precise movement-based predictions in the mouse auditory cortex
Stimulus-specific prediction error neurons in mouse auditory cortex