Chronogenesis

In this paper, the authors developed a new probe to visualize intracellular cAMP and extracellular peptides and succeeded in cAMP and peptide secretory rhythm imaging in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (central circadian clock). They discovered that the circadian rhythm of cAMP is generated by a neural network mediated by neuropeptides and that cAMP generated by this network regulates the intracellular molecular clock.

The cerebellum is thought to be involved in synchronized movements, such as dancing to music or clapping hands, but the underlying neural mechanisms are largely unknown. In this study, the authors trained monkeys to move their eyes in synchrony with alternating visual stimuli that appeared at regular intervals. They found that individual neurons in the cerebellum predicted the timing of each stimulus and modulated their activity for errors of movement timing, revealing part of the mechanism for synchronized movements.

A hallmark of our motor system is the ability to generate motor commands by predicting motor outcomes. In this study, Takei (Group C01) and colleagues demonstrated that temporary cooling of dorsal premotor and parietal cortex distinctly impairs animals' behaviours, paralleling to the impairment of generation of “future" motor commands and estimation of "present" states, respectively.

In this paper, the authors trained rats in a novel behavioral task to show gradually changing reward-seeking actions over multiple minutes for a future reward. They discovered generation of elapsed-time dependent neuronal firing patterns in the hippocampus and the striatum as rats learned the temporal structure of the task.

A new collaborative study between group A01 and B01 has been published in Cerebral Cortex. The study shows that the Now is represented in the precuneus that occupies the center of the entire cerebral cortex.

In this new paper, Hayashi (Group C01, CiNet/NICT) and Ivry (UC Berkeley) reported evidence that, by combining a temporal illusion and neuroimaging technique, the subjective experience of time is reflected in the activity of the supramarginal gyrus in the human brain.

Ms. Eri Kuroda, a first-year student of graduate school at Ochanomizu University, and Dr. Ichiro Kobayashi (Group A01) proposed a new predictive coding deep learning model that can flexibly change the prediction duration as humans do. They won the Excellence Research Award at the 82nd National Convention of IPSJ.

The authors examined cortical cognitive representations by developing encoding and decoding models of human brain activity evoked using 103 diverse cognitive tasks. They found time-related sub-clusters in the cognitive representational space.

The authors found that in human and mice, histamine improves long-term memory test scores by strengthening weakened memory traces. In mice, it could temporarily extend the lifetimes of memories by as much as 25 days longer than normal.