Authorship：Lead author   Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

Decision-making is often biased, leading to non-optimal outcomes. However, how these biases emerge is only poorly understood. Here, we leverage the mouse auditory system, testing perceptual discrimination of pulsed sound stimuli in a categorical go/no-go task, and observe systematic choice biases to specific sounds shared across individuals. We parametrically characterize the pulsed sounds using an interpretable set of stimulus features and identify those that effectively capture stimulus-evoked activity as measured by large-scale two-photon calcium imaging in the auditory cortex. We find that stimulus features are encoded with varying degrees of representational entanglement. Linking neural and behavioral assessments, we show that the feature set of a given stimulus predicts perceptual decisions and associated biases. Together, our findings highlight representational architectures as relevant underpinnings of perceptual decision-making.

DOI： 10.1016/j.celrep.2026.117221

PubMed

Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)   Publisher：Nature Methods  

Tissue clearing has been widely used for fluorescence imaging of fixed tissues, but its application to live tissues has been limited by toxicity. Here we develop minimally invasive optical clearing media for fluorescence imaging of live mammalian tissues. Light scattering is minimized by adding spherical polymers with low osmolarity to the extracellular medium. A clearing medium containing bovine serum albumin (SeeDB-Live) is compatible with live cells, enabling structural and functional imaging of live tissues, such as spheroids, organoids, acute brain slices and the mouse brains in vivo. SeeDB-Live minimally affects neuronal electrophysiological properties and sensory responses in vivo, and facilitates fluorescence imaging of deep cortical layers in live animals without detectable toxicity to neurons or behavior. We further demonstrate its utility to epifluorescence voltage imaging in acute brain slices and in vivo preparations. Thus, SeeDB-Live expands both the depth and modality range of fluorescence imaging in live mammalian tissues.

DOI： 10.1038/s41592-026-03023-y

Web of Science

Scopus

PubMed

Language：English   Publisher：Brain Sciences  

Music is a near-universal anthropological and sensory phenomenon that engages distributed brain networks and peripheral physiological systems to shape emotion, cognition, sociality, and bodily regulation. Evidence from electrophysiology, neuroimaging, endocrinology, randomized controlled trials, and longitudinal training studies indicates that both receptive and active musical experiences produce experience-dependent neural and systemic adaptations. These include entrainment of neural oscillations, modulation of predictive and reward signaling, autonomic and neuroendocrine changes, and long-term structural connectivity alterations that support affect regulation, cognition, social functioning, motor control, sleep, and resilience to neuropsychiatric illness. This narrative review integrates mechanistic domains with clinical outcomes across major conditions, such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, dementia, and selected neurodevelopmental disorders, by mapping acoustic and procedural parameters onto plausible biological pathways. We summarize how tempo, beat regularity, timbre and spectral content, predictability, active versus passive engagement, social context, dose, and timing influence neural entrainment, synaptic and network plasticity, reward and prediction-error dynamics, autonomic balance, and immune/endocrine mediators. For each condition, we synthesize randomized and observational findings and explicitly link observed improvements to mechanistic pathways. We identify methodological limitations, including heterogeneous interventions, small and biased samples, sparse longitudinal imaging and standardized physiological endpoints, and inconsistent acoustic reporting, and translate these into recommendations for translational trials: harmonized acoustic reporting, pre-specified mechanistic endpoints (neuroimaging, autonomic, neuroendocrine, immune markers), adequately powered randomized designs with active controls, and long-term follow-up. Contextual moderators including music education, socioeconomic and cultural factors, sport, sleep, and ritual practices are emphasized as critical determinants of implementation and effectiveness.

DOI： 10.3390/brainsci15111248

Web of Science

Scopus

PubMed

Authorship：Lead author  

加齢や神経変性による神経細胞の喪失にもかかわらず、大脳皮質の感覚処理は驚くほど安定している。本研究ではマウス聴覚野を対象に、神経細胞除去後も表現地図が回復する仕組みを示し、抑制性ニューロンの喪失が回復を妨げることを明らかにした。

Authorship：Lead author   Language：English   Publishing type：Research paper (scientific journal)  

Neural systems have evolved to process sensory stimuli in a way that allows for efficient and adaptive behavior in a complex environment. Recent technological advances enable us to investigate sensory processing in animal models by simultaneously recording the activity of large populations of neurons with single-cell resolution, yielding high-dimensional datasets. In this review, we discuss concepts and approaches for assessing the population-level representation of sensory stimuli in the form of a representational map. In such a map, not only are the identities of stimuli distinctly represented, but their relational similarity is also mapped onto the space of neuronal activity. We highlight example studies in which the structure of representational maps in the brain are estimated from recordings in humans as well as animals and compare their methodological approaches. Finally, we integrate these aspects and provide an outlook for how the concept of representational maps could be applied to various fields in basic and clinical neuroscience.

DOI： 10.3389/fncel.2024.1366200

PubMed

Language：English  

Author：Other 

Author：Other