since our previous rat handling video was so popular, we created a new (slightly nicer) version. Learn how to habituate your rats to be comfortable with you! youtube.com/watch?v=URPBvMJ1…

We had a great time at the @ESRS_Sleep sleep meeting in Seville! Great talks and lovely meeting up with long-time sleep friends (@Abdelrayan2 and @L_Genzel representing the lab)

Lab picture of 2024!

We are at FENS! Just enjoyed a fantastic talk by Onur Güntürkün

Happy Birthday Rat HexMaze! Its been already wonderful 5 years with hopefully many more to come! The journey has been lovely so far (and yes....still not published....coming soon! ;-) ). Toddler years credit to @sleepybiologist , let the next era begin!

Hollywood came to Genzel lab! (a.k.a JOVE filming with @3Dneuro for jove.com/t/66457/the-td-driv…)

We also discuss what animals actually learn in these different mazes. For mazes with dedicated start/goal locations, animals can rely on simple rules, body turns or paths. To solve complex mazes however, animals require an understanding of the complete environment.

Complexer mazes have varying degrees of adaptability for start- or goal locations. All these factors affect the time it takes for animals to learn the task, and should be considered by researchers when designing experiments.

First, we give an overview on various mazes developed over the past 100+ years. We classify these tasks by difficulty level and navigational strategies. Most of the traditional mazes have dedicated locations for the animal to start, and where to find the reward.

New paper from the lab! CBD lengthens sleep but shortens ripples and leads to intact simple but worse cumulative memory sciencedirect.com/science/ar…

Here a summary of learning effects and RGS14 effects: in short after increased plasticity in the prefrontal cortex all experiences (also home cage) are treated like salient information for semantic-like learning. The discrimination of what is important is missing.