We sat down with Lukas Ian Schmitt (@lucidianS), a team leader at RIKEN CBS, and talked about his trajectory, life in Japan, past and ongoing projects about the distributed computation in the cortico-thalamic loop, and related works (Recorded on 9/10)
Show Notes:
- Ian’s lab at RIKEN: Laboratory for Distributed Cognitive Processing
- Miho: Miho Nakajima-san
- Mike Halassa’s lab @NYU->MIT
- Phil Haydon’s lab @Tufts
- Santa Fe
- The Neuron by Kaczmarek (and Levitan) (Still have the original on my shelf here. – Ian)
- StarLogo@MIT
- Ian’s work at the grad school: the astrocyte-neuron interaction
- Matt Wilson Lab
- Mike’s work at Matt Wilson’s lab
- Ian’s works during postdoc: Rule representations in the cross-modal sensory attention task #1 #2 (mentioned as ”The thalamo-cortical paper”, MD-mPFC loop) #3
- Guo/Inagaki’s paper (VM/VAL-ALM loop)
- Just wanted to mention that my statement (around 13:50) about the MD having the strongest connection of any thalamic nucleus is a bit poorly formed and so basically un-falsifiable. It is very strongly reciprocally connected with PFC though. -Ian
- If you change the rule sets, the dynamics change a little bit in subgroups of MD thalamic neurons
- A review on subnetworks of thalamic nuclei by Roy & Guoping
- “Higher-orderness” of thalamus
- Inagaki’s other paper: Switching the transition is also thalamic based
- Diversity of arborization of the thalamic neurons: for MD, search ”Mediodorsal nucleus of thalamus” + “soma” and for LP (Pulvinar in primate), search “Lateral posterior nucleus of the thalamus”
- Continuously elevated firing rate in mPFC of primates
- Stable representations mixed with heterogeneous activity in the PFC (around 21:45), example1, 2 – Ian
- PPC: Posterior parietal cortex
- Transient elevation in firing rate in songbird’s motor cortex (HVC) neurons
- Idea of reduced representational drift with continuously elevated firing rates (around 23:30) – Ian
- Athena Akrami
- Chris Harvey
- Takaki Komiyama
- Akihiro Funamizu
- Kenji Doya
- PPC is important for history representation
- Pulvinar is right underneath PPC and can be recorded simultaneously
- A review discussing the region identified as the PPC – Ian
- Chris Harvey’s regional selection. see Fig S1 of this paper
- Primate counter-part is a little bit visually focused
- Ian’s strategy for the research
- Carlos Brody’s lab
- Ahena Akrami’s paper
- ITI: Inter-trial-interval
- Around 44-45 min in I was referring to Hanks 2015 and to some extent Boyd-Meredith 2022 (both studies from the Brody lab) as being similar to 2021 Cell Rep paper by Cohen. But maybe there is not so clear a link…. -Ian
- Jeremiah Cohen
- His recent publication on representation of the task history in PL
- History dependent dynamic foraging task: This was also characterized in the above reference and in Hattori et al. from Komiyama lab too. – Kenta
- Chronic recording by Neuropixel version 2
- Drive design in Michael Halassa Lab -Ian
- Form 3 (3D printer)
- Polyimide Tube
- Autoclavable 3D printable material
- Pulvinar contains many sub-region based on anatomical connectivity
- Computational Advantages conferred by biologically inspired networks -Ian
- Deep Brain Stimulation-type of approaches can do that a bit
- Distinct genetically defined populations in TRN
- Allen’s large scale expression study in thalamus, for example
- Waveform-based cell-type classification: The approaches we are using are mostly based on methods from Buzsaki lab in combination with a dimensionality reduction and clustering approach similar to the one in this paper – Ian
- Hypothalamus cell type with defined functional roles, for example
- Spatio-temporal segregation by NeuroPixel: see Inagaki et al., 2022
- LGN is layered in primates
- Structured networks sometimes perform better/faster
- Topography of projection in thalamus
- Idea of having a parallel stream of processing through the thalamus is useful: I was thinking of some ideas from Murray Sherman and Sabine Kastner (e.g. this paper, and this) – Ian
- Enlargement of the pulvinar over evolution
- International brain laboratory (IBL)
- Effect of the head-fixation on the behavior, see this reference for example
- Latest paper from IBL on the reproducibility of E-phys recording
- On the reproducibility of Behavior
Editorial Notes:
- Really nice conversation though I guess we have some difference as to whether thalamic computational roles are an inevitable network design or just based on evolutionary history (I guess time and research will reveal who’s right!) In any case, I really enjoyed talking science with you both! – Ian
- I enjoyed the discussion and it was nice to see the connection between Ian’s work and others’ on the thalamus. It seems the time has finally come to decipher thalamic functions and I hope our new work will change the way we think about how the brain computes information! -Miho
- Recent evolutionary expansion in thalamus/LP could be just optimization around local minima. Let’s see how Ian’s work would discard this possibility! For now, we can happily agree to disagree! – Kenta/萩
- It was a perfect way to drop our first episode for both domestic and international listeners. Thanks, Ian and Miho! -Tak/脇
