Neuronal mechanisms underlying gating of sensory information

我们大脑的唯一输入是感官信息。这些信息被处理、存储和整合，以产生大脑的输出——一种行为反应。我们的五种感官一直处于活跃状态，用感官信息轰击大脑。为了处理大量的信息，不同的机制可以过滤掉不重要的信息，并使大脑能够保护其资源，以处理突出的和潜在的重要输入。一组感觉过滤机制被称为感觉门控。感觉门控发生在感觉信息加工的早期阶段，即信息到达意识之前，发生在中枢神经系统的感觉通路中。已经描述了两种不同的神经元机制，它们内置于大脑的线路中，以控制信息，从而保护大脑免受信息溢出。这两种感觉门控机制都可以在人类和动物身上观察到，使用声惊吓刺激作为一种工具，其中产生的惊吓反应的幅度是在不同条件下感觉刺激门控效率的行为解读。此外，惊吓反应是由一条较短且描述良好的通路介导的，因此可以研究感觉门控的神经基质。我们的目标是进一步揭示感觉门控背后的突触和分子机制，以便更好地理解大脑中的感觉信息处理。这将影响我们对大脑如何处理感官信息的基本理解，也可能有助于开发高负荷信号输入技术系统中的过滤算法。

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.