Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Wolpaw, Jonathan R.
• Kamesar, Adam

Titel

Heksor: the central nervous system substrate of an adaptive behaviour

Ist Teil von

• The Journal of physiology, 2022-08, Vol.600 (15), p.3423-3452

Ort / Verlag

England: Wiley Subscription Services, Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Quelle

Wiley-Blackwell Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Over the past half‐century, the largely hardwired central nervous system (CNS) of 1970 has become the ubiquitously plastic CNS of today, in which change is the rule not the exception. This transformation complicates a central question in neuroscience: how are adaptive behaviours – behaviours that serve the needs of the individual – acquired and maintained through life? It poses a more basic question: how do many adaptive behaviours share the ubiquitously plastic CNS? This question compels neuroscience to adopt a new paradigm. The core of this paradigm is a CNS entity with unique properties, here given the name heksor from the Greek hexis. A heksor is a distributed network of neurons and synapses that changes itself as needed to maintain the key features of an adaptive behaviour, the features that make the behaviour satisfactory. Through their concurrent changes, the numerous heksors that share the CNS negotiate the properties of the neurons and synapses that they all use. Heksors keep the CNS in a state of negotiated equilibrium that enables each heksor to maintain the key features of its behaviour. The new paradigm based on heksors and the negotiated equilibrium they create is supported by animal and human studies of interactions among new and old adaptive behaviours, explains otherwise inexplicable results, and underlies promising new approaches to restoring behaviours impaired by injury or disease. Furthermore, the paradigm offers new and potentially important answers to extant questions, such as the generation and function of spontaneous neuronal activity, the aetiology of muscle synergies, and the control of homeostatic plasticity. figure legend The first image on the left is a naïve CNS. The triangles are neurons or synapses; their properties can be modified by experience. Early in life, experience creates the substrate (the heksor) for flexion‐withdrawal behaviour. Its heksor (green) comprises a network of neurons and synapses that changes itself as needed to maintain satisfactory flexion‐withdrawal. Later on, experience creates the heksor for locomotion (red); it changes itself as needed to maintain satisfactory locomotion. Because the two heksors overlap, their concurrent changes are a negotiation. They negotiate the properties of their neurons and synapses so that each heksor maintains satisfactory performance of its behaviour. Still later, athletic training creates the heksor for throwing the discus (orange). This expands the negotiation. Each of the three heksors may affect the neurons or synapses in any one of them. Together, the heksors keep the CNS in a state of negotiated equilibrium that ensures satisfactory performance of all their behaviours.