Miguel Angelo L. Nicolelis

Journal article Trends Cogn Sci · November 1, 2002 Featured Publication By using electrical brain stimulation to deliver both 'virtual' tactile cues and rewards to freely roaming rats, Talwar et al. have been able to instruct animals remotely to navigate through complex mazes and natural environments they have never visited be ... Full text Link to item Cite

Multielectrode recordings: the next steps.

Journal article Curr Opin Neurobiol · October 2002 Featured Publication At present, a growing number of laboratories are acquiring the capability of simultaneously monitoring the extracellular activity of over a hundred single neurons in both anaesthetized and awake animals. This paradigm, known as multielectrode recordings, i ... Full text Link to item Cite

Controlling robots with the mind.

Journal article Sci Am · October 2002 Featured Publication Full text Link to item Cite

Gustatory processing is dynamic and distributed.

Journal article Curr Opin Neurobiol · August 2002 Featured Publication The process of gustatory coding consists of neural responses that provide information about the quantity and quality of food, its generalized sensation, its hedonic value, and whether it should be swallowed. Many of the models presently used to analyze gus ... Full text Link to item Cite

Thalamocortical [correction of Thalamcortical] optimization of tactile processing according to behavioral state.

Journal article Nat Neurosci · June 2002 Featured Publication We propose a conceptual model that describes the operation of the main thalamocortical loop of the rat somatosensory system. According to this model, the asynchronous convergence of ascending and descending projections dynamically alters the physiological ... Full text Link to item Cite

Depression at thalamocortical synapses: the key for cortical neuronal adaptation?

Journal article Neuron · April 25, 2002 Featured Publication Neuronal adaptation to repetitive sensory stimuli is ubiquitous in the mammalian cortex. Despite its prevalence, the cellular mechanisms underlying this basic physiological property remain a matter of dispute. In this issue of Neuron, Chung et al. provide ... Full text Link to item Cite

Taste-specific neuronal ensembles in the gustatory cortex of awake rats.

Journal article J Neurosci · March 1, 2002 Featured Publication In gustatory cortex, single-neuron activity reflects the multimodal processing of taste stimuli. Little is known, however, about the interactions between gustatory cortical (GC) neurons during tastant processing. Here, these interactions were characterized ... Full text Link to item Cite

Integration of bilateral whisker stimuli in rats: role of the whisker barrel cortices.

Journal article Cereb Cortex · January 2002 Featured Publication Recently, we demonstrated that neural responses within the whisker region of the primary somatosensory cortex (SIw) of rats are profoundly influenced by the spatiotemporal attributes of ipsilateral, as well as contralateral, whisker stimuli. As inactivatio ... Full text Link to item Cite

Thalamic bursting in rats during different awake behavioral states.

Journal article Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A · December 18, 2001 Featured Publication Thalamic neurons have two firing modes: tonic and bursting. It was originally suggested that bursting occurs only during states such as slow-wave sleep, when little or no information is relayed by the thalamus. However, bursting occurs during wakefulness i ... Full text Link to item Cite

The brain decade in debate: VI. Sensory and motor maps: dynamics and plasticity.

Journal article Braz J Med Biol Res · December 2001 Featured Publication This article is an edited transcription of a virtual symposium promoted by the Brazilian Society of Neuroscience and Behavior (SBNeC). Although the dynamics of sensory and motor representations have been one of the most studied features of the central nerv ... Full text Link to item Cite

Role of cortical feedback in the receptive field structure and nonlinear response properties of somatosensory thalamic neurons.

Journal article Exp Brain Res · November 2001 Featured Publication Previous studies have suggested that the descending pathway from the primary somatosensory (SI) cortex to the ventral posterior nucleus of the thalamus has only a mild facilitative influence over thalamic neurons. Given the large numbers of corticothalamic ... Full text Link to item Cite

Techniques for long-term multisite neuronal ensemble recordings in behaving animals.

Journal article Methods · October 2001 Featured Publication Advances in our understanding of neural systems will go hand in hand with improvements in the experimental techniques used to study these systems. This article describes a series of methodological developments aimed at enhancing the power of the methods ne ... Full text Link to item Cite

Behavioral properties of the trigeminal somatosensory system in rats performing whisker-dependent tactile discriminations.

Journal article J Neurosci · August 1, 2001 Featured Publication To address several fundamental questions regarding how multiwhisker tactile stimuli are integrated and processed by the trigeminal somatosensory system, a novel behavioral task was developed that required rats to discriminate the width of either a wide or ... Full text Link to item Cite

Bilateral integration of whisker information in the primary somatosensory cortex of rats.

Journal article J Neurosci · July 15, 2001 Featured Publication The isomorphic representation of the contralateral whisker pad in the rodent cerebral cortex has served as a canonical example in primary somatosensory areas that the contralateral body surface is spatially represented as a topographic map. By characterizi ... Full text Link to item Cite

Dynamic and multimodal responses of gustatory cortical neurons in awake rats.

Journal article J Neurosci · June 15, 2001 Featured Publication To investigate the dynamic aspects of gustatory activity, we recorded the responses of small ensembles of cortical neurons to tastants administered to awake rats. Multiple trials of each tastant were delivered during recordings made in oral somatosensory ( ... Full text Link to item Cite

Feature article: the structure and function of dynamic cortical and thalamic receptive fields.

Journal article Cereb Cortex · March 2001 Featured Publication Under natural conditions, animals must process spatiotemporally complex signals in order to guide adaptive behavior. It follows that the response properties of neurons should reflect the dynamic nature of such signals. Recently, several studies have demons ... Full text Link to item Cite

A multi-channel whisker stimulator for producing spatiotemporally complex tactile stimuli.

Journal article J Neurosci Methods · January 15, 2001 Featured Publication A system is described that delivers complex, biologically realistic, tactile stimuli to the rat's facial whisker pad by independently stimulating up to 16 individual facial whiskers in a flexible yet highly controlled and repeatable manner. The system is t ... Full text Link to item Cite

Thalamocortical and corticocortical interactions in the somatosensory system.

Journal article Prog Brain Res · 2001 Featured Publication Link to item Cite