Origins of arousal: roles for medullary reticular neurons.

The existence of a primitive CNS function involved in the activation of all vertebrate behaviors, generalized arousal (GA), has been proposed. Here, we provide an overview of the neuroanatomical, neurophysiological and molecular properties of reticular neurons within the nucleus gigantocellularis (NGC) of the mammalian medulla, and propose that the properties of these neurons equip them to contribute powerfully to GA. We also explore the hypothesis that these neurons may have evolved from the Mauthner cell in the medulla of teleost fish, although NGC neurons have a wider range of action far beyond the specific escape network served by Mauthner cells. Understanding the neuronal circuits that control and regulate GA is central to understanding how motivated behaviors such as hunger, thirst and sexual behaviors arise.

Multimodal sensory responses of nucleus reticularis gigantocellularis and the responses' relation to cortical and motor activation.

The connectivity of large neurons of the nucleus reticularis gigantocellularis (NRGc) in the medullary reticular formation potentially allows both for the integration of stimuli, in several modalities, that would demand immediate action, and for coordinated activation of cortical and motoric activity. We have simultaneously recorded cortical local field potentials, neck muscle electromyograph (EMG), and the neural activity of medullary NRGc neurons in unrestrained, unanesthetized rats to determine whether the activity of the NRGc is consistent with the modulation of general arousal. We observed excitatory responses of individual NRGc neurons to all modalities tested: tactile, visual, auditory, vestibular, and olfactory. Excitation was directly linked to increases in neck muscle EMG amplitude and corresponded with increases in the power of fast oscillations (30 to 80 Hz) of cortical activity and decreases in the power of slow oscillations (2 to 8 Hz). Because these reticular formation neurons can respond to broad ranges of stimuli with increased firing rates associated with the initiation of behavioral responses, we infer that they are part of an elementary "first responder" CNS arousal mechanism.

Relations between mechanisms of CNS arousal and mechanisms of stress.

In the centennial year of the birth of Hans Selye, this review compares his classical concepts of stress with a modern approach to mechanisms of CNS arousal. Relations between the two concepts are described. Neuroanatomical, neurophysiological, and functional genomic mechanisms underlying CNS arousal are briefly reviewed. Controls over stress responses and arousal are compared to particular concepts of control system engineering. Understanding these two systems is of crucial importance because their dysregulation is associated with large numbers of disease states.

Masking and scrambling in the auditory thalamus of awake rats by Gaussian and modulated noises.

This paper provides a look at how modulated broad-band noises modulate the thalamic response evoked by brief probe sounds in the awake animal. We demonstrate that noise not only attenuates the response to probe sounds (masking) but also changes the temporal response pattern (scrambling). Two brief probe sounds, a Gaussian noise burst and a brief sinusoidal tone, were presented in silence and in three ongoing noises. The three noises were targeted at activating the auditory system in qualitatively distinct ways. Dynamic ripple noise, containing many random tone-like elements, is targeted at those parts of the auditory system that respond well to tones. International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology noise, comprised of the sum of several simultaneous streams of Schroeder-phase speech, is targeted at those parts of the auditory system that respond well to modulated sounds but lack a well defined response to tones. Gaussian noise is targeted at those parts of the auditory system that respond to acoustic energy regardless of modulation. All noises both attenuated and decreased the precise temporal repeatability of the onset response to probe sounds. In addition, the modulated noises induced context-specific changes in the temporal pattern of the response to probe sounds. Scrambling of the temporal response pattern may be a direct neural correlate of the unfortunate experience of being able to hear, but not understand, speech sounds in noisy environments.