Discovery of The First Command Neuron Mediated Behavior
In 1946, C.A.G. Wiersma first described the tail-flip escape in the crayfish Procambarus clarkii and noted that the giant interneurons present in the tail were responsible for the reaction. The aforementioned neuronal fibres consist of a pair of lateral giant interneurons and a pair of medial giant interneurons, and Wiersma found that stimulating just one Lateral Giant Interneuron (LG or LGI) or one Medial Giant Interneuron (MG or MGI) would result in the execution of a tail flip. Wiersma and K. Ikeda then proposed the term “Command Neuron” in their 1964 publication, and applied it to the giant interneurons ability to command the expression of the escape response. This was the first description of a command neuron mediated behavior and it indicated that the depolarization of a neuron could precipitate complex innate behaviors in some organisms.
This concept was further fleshed out with more specific and stringent conditions in 1972 when Kupfermann and Weiss published The Command Neuron Concept. The paper stated that command neurons were neurons (or small sets of neurons) carrying the entire command signal for a natural behavioral response. According to the authors, command neurons were both necessary and sufficient in the production of a behavioral response. The concept of command neuron mediated behaviors was both ground breaking and controversial, since determining command neuron mediated behaviors was a problematic process due to difficulties in understanding and interpreting anatomical and behavioral data.
Read more about this topic: Caridoid Escape Reaction
Famous quotes containing the words discovery of the, discovery of, discovery, command, mediated and/or behavior:
“Your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which I intended to build my arithmetic.... It is all the more serious since, with the loss of my rule V, not only the foundations of my arithmetic, but also the sole possible foundations of arithmetic seem to vanish.”
—Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)
“The gain is not the having of children; it is the discovery of love and how to be loving.”
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)
“One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable—that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“We can’t command our love, but we can our actions.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“We talk about taking “pleasure in a thing”: but in truth it is pleasure in ourselves, mediated by a thing.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The fact that behavior is “normal,” or consistent with childhood development, does not necessarily make it desirable or acceptable...Undesirable impulses do not have to be embraces as something good in order to be accepted as normal. Neither does children’s behavior that is unacceptable have to be condemned as “bad,” in order to bring it under control.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)