Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The sole input into our brain is sensory information. This information is processed, stored, and integrated in order to generate the brain's output - a behavioural response. Our five senses are constantly active, bombarding the brain with sensory information. In order to cope with this vast amount of information, different mechanisms are in place that filter out unimportant information and enable the brain to protect its resources for the processing of salient and potentially important input. One group of the sensory filtering mechanisms is called sensory gating. Sensory gating takes place in the central nervous system sensory pathways at an early stage of sensory information processing before information reaches consciousness. Two different neuronal mechanisms have been described that are built into the wiring of the brain in order to gate the information and thereby protect the brain from information overflow. Both sensory gating mechanisms can be observed in humans and animals using acoustic startle stimuli as a tool, where the amplitude of the resulting startle response is a behavioural read-out of how efficient the sensory stimulus is gated under different conditions. Furthermore, the startle response is mediated by a short and well described pathway, so that the neural substrates of sensory gating can be studied. Our goal is to further unravel the synaptic and molecular mechanisms underlying sensory gating in order to better understand sensory information processing in the brain. This will impact the basic understanding of how our brain processes sensory information, and might also help to develop algorithms for filtering in technical systems with a high load of signal input.