Week 4

In Herry et al's paper from this week, I felt some confusion from the beginning of the article, mostly in terms of why they chose to investigate certain topics and the implications of their research. I understood the basic premise of fear conditioning and extinction, and I thought it was interesting that they wanted to focus in on specific neuronal circuits within the BA, hippocampus, and mPFC, since not much is known about them. They began by establishing that there are certain "fear neurons" and "extinction neurons," which I found interesting but not at all surprising, and that they can discriminate between extinguished and non-extinguished stimuli. However, they then chose to apply a "change-point analysis algorithm," which I did not quite understand. I also had trouble understanding the figures associated with it, as well as understanding certain aspects of other graphs throughout the study. Aside from the questions I had, I found the paper to overall ask some interesting questions, and that perhaps this research could have important implications down the line. I appreciated the way the paper was organized in that every section explained what they were testing and why. It will be interesting to discuss this in class tomorrow, and to hear opinions about particular applications of the study. None of the papers we've discussed so far have talked about context, so I think it was interesting that Herry et al investigated the way context relates to fear. This type of research could be very useful in developing treatments for PTSD and other fear-related disorders down the line.

Reznikov et al, on the other hand, was interesting in that it focused on weak- and strong-extinction classifications, and studied differences between them. I found the paper to be overall more cohesive and have more apparent possible applications, although again I'm curious as to what the class has to say about the applications of the weak and strong classifications. I also appreciated the way this paper combined behavioral testing with the study of corticosterone, which is important in stress. Although this paper was a model of human PTSD, I think the findings can be applied to anxiety and stress in general as well as all disorders that are in this realm (just as past papers on depression could actually have strong implications for other disorders as well). 

Overall, I think both papers present fascinating sides to the study of PTSD and related disorders, and I'm interested to start discussing this new topic of PTSD. Although all human illnesses, especially psychological ones, can be difficult to model in animals, I think that perhaps PTSD can be a little more clear in terms of direct application to humans because of the strong element of fear. Fear and traumatic events can be much easier to model in animals compared to depression or anxiety which takes on so many forms and can come from many causes (not to say PTSD doesn't, but depression seems to have a wider range and therefore is more difficult to study).