Purdue Assistant Professor seeing how infant movements teach our brains about our bodies. At home, I'm ~2.5 years into an 18+ year developmental experiment named Elaina.
Views are my own (but think what it says about society that I have to say that...)
Jimmy Dooley
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Big thanks to @sfnjournals.bsky.social for highlighting our upcoming paper! We’re mapping out how the distinct building blocks of REM sleep—tonic and phasic dynamics—actually develop and organize in early life. Can’t wait for the final version to drop soon!
Thanks to everyone in the lab for getting this out the door. And we've got way cooler M1-RN stuff in the works - so stay tuned!
Same basic story for the P24 M1-RN data (Fig. S4) - there's a huge discrepancy between EMG and movement during wake, but for twitches, the correspondence is pretty good.
So can you use EMGs to detect twitches. In short - yes. But there's a couple of catches.
1) you're recording from a single muscle (maybe even just a few muscle fibers) so you're getting a limited look at movement.
2) There's WAY more false negatives (only ~20% of twitches are detected vs. video)
Unfortunately, the methods we used weren't sensitive enough to pick that up since that kind of detailed kinematics wasn't the point of that study. But we're doing our best to be sure that doesn't happen again! Here's recent data from the lab, showing we can now track limbs in 3D throughout movement.
Now for the unpublished part:
At P24, we found RN neurons that showed activity during specific wake behaviors (Fig. 6). The one we show in this fig fires preferentially during grooming - and shows strong inhibition during other wake movements. So what's that same RN neuron doing during REM sleep?
Turns out - we see the same pattern, bursting for some twitches but inhibition for others. What's super cool is that it's sped up. The burst and the inhibition is only ~25% as long as during wake, so it's like the whole motor system is accelerated. So what kind of twitches happen during the bursts?
The reviewer-suggested addition: We had EMGs, but triggered twitches and wake movements on video. How do they compare?
The figure is in the supplement (Figure S3). Twitches = purple; wake movements = green.
Basically, for twitches, EMG tracks 100 fps video quite well - less so for wake movements
This has been a long time coming - but our M1 Development/M1-RN paper is finally out in its final form!
Rather than re-hash the original story, I'm going to talk about one of the biggest reviewer-suggested additions, as well as some unpublished data!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Jimmy Dooley
Jimmy Dooley
Jimmy Dooley
Jimmy Dooley
I keep going back to how tough it would be to explain REM sleep and twitching to an alien (assuming they don't do it too, which maybe isn't a given)
