Professor Ed X. Wu of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and his team had worked on the research for the topic “Functional MRI reveals brain-wide actions of thalamically-initiated oscillatory activities on associative memory consolidation”. The research was recently published by Nature Communications on April 17, 2023.
Details of the publication:
Functional MRI reveals brain-wide actions of thalamically-initiated oscillatory activities on associative memory consolidation
Xunda Wang, Alex T. L. Leong, Shawn Z. K. Tan, Eddie C. Wong, Yilong Liu, Lee-Wei Lim & Ed X. Wu, Article in Nature Communications,
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37682-8
Abstract:
As a key oscillatory activity in the brain, thalamic spindle activities are long believed to support memory consolidation. However, their propagation characteristics and causal actions at systems level remain unclear. Using functional MRI (fMRI) and electrophysiology recordings in male rats, we found that optogenetically-evoked somatosensory thalamic spindle-like activities targeted numerous sensorimotor (cortex, thalamus, brainstem and basal ganglia) and non-sensorimotor limbic regions (cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus) in a stimulation frequency- and length-dependent manner. Thalamic stimulation at slow spindle frequency (8 Hz) and long spindle length (3 s) evoked the most robust brain-wide cross-modal activities. Behaviorally, evoking these global cross-modal activities during memory consolidation improved visual-somatosensory associative memory performance. More importantly, parallel visual fMRI experiments uncovered response potentiation in brain-wide sensorimotor and limbic integrative regions, especially superior colliculus, periaqueductal gray, and insular, retrosplenial and frontal cortices. Our study directly reveals that thalamic spindle activities propagate in a spatiotemporally specific manner and that they consolidate associative memory by strengthening multi-target memory representation.