Vikaas Sohal receives funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative, the UCSF Dolby Family Center for Mood Disorders, and the Bay Area Psychedelic Research consortium.
Kathleen Cho receives funding from the Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (Inserm) and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (MSCA-IF).
Being flexible and learning to adapt when the world changes is something you practice every day. Whether you run into a new construction site and have to reroute your commute or download a new streaming app and have to relearn how to find your favorite show, changing familiar behaviors in response to new situations is an essential skill.
To make these adaptations, your brain changes its activity patterns within a structure called the prefrontal cortex – an area of the brain critical for cognitive functions such as attention, planning and decision-making. But which specific circuits “tell” the prefrontal cortex to update its activity patterns in order to change behavior have been unknown.
We are a team of neuroscientists who study how the brain processes information and what happens when this function is impaired. In our newly published research, we discovered a special class of neurons in the prefrontal cortex that may enable flexible behavior and, when they malfunction, may lead to conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.