Writing in the Sciences
There's a lovely course on Coursera from Stanford, "Writing in the Sciences". One of the very first things that Kristin Sainin does is taking paragraphs from the literature and editing them to make them more clear.
I thought I would play that game and lay my hands on some examples from the literature.
From a paper:
"Together these findings suggest that the changes in CS responsiveness displayed by BLA cells following appetitive or aversive conditioning constitute potentiated sensory responses that can automatically trigger approach or defensive CRs through distinct neuronal outputs."
My version:
"BLA cells respond differently to a neutral sensory stimulus after it is paired with an either aversive or rewarding unconditioned stimulus. These potentiated responses drive changes in behavior through distinct neuronal outputs."
Here's some of my unedited writing:
"For decades neuroscience has been progressing, studying cognition by mapping brain responses neuron by neuron, circuit by circuit. The zebrafish presents a radical model organism, because of its translucence which permits imaging the activity of the entire brain during learning and behavior. A question of intense interest in neuroscience is how animals learn to approach stimuli that they find pleasurable and avoid stimuli that are noxious. One of the things we have learned by studying operant conditioning in mice is that neural encoding of reward and its opposite relies on populations of neurons as individual cells tend to show mixed responses to these stimuli. For example experimental studies in the mouse basolateral amygdala, a critical brain region for fear learning, showed that few cells encode the valence of a stimulus in their individual responses, but paradoxically the valence can be decoded from the response of the population (Kyriazi, 2018). Extending the analogy, it is possible that the whole is more than the sum of its parts at the level of neural circuits. The premise of this research proposal is that the complexity of biological behavior necessitates an analysis of the coordination of activity of networks of circuits."
Edited:
"
"
This is fun!
I thought I would play that game and lay my hands on some examples from the literature.
From a paper:
"Together these findings suggest that the changes in CS responsiveness displayed by BLA cells following appetitive or aversive conditioning constitute potentiated sensory responses that can automatically trigger approach or defensive CRs through distinct neuronal outputs."
My version:
"BLA cells respond differently to a neutral sensory stimulus after it is paired with an either aversive or rewarding unconditioned stimulus. These potentiated responses drive changes in behavior through distinct neuronal outputs."
Here's some of my unedited writing:
"For decades neuroscience has been progressing, studying cognition by mapping brain responses neuron by neuron, circuit by circuit. The zebrafish presents a radical model organism, because of its translucence which permits imaging the activity of the entire brain during learning and behavior. A question of intense interest in neuroscience is how animals learn to approach stimuli that they find pleasurable and avoid stimuli that are noxious. One of the things we have learned by studying operant conditioning in mice is that neural encoding of reward and its opposite relies on populations of neurons as individual cells tend to show mixed responses to these stimuli. For example experimental studies in the mouse basolateral amygdala, a critical brain region for fear learning, showed that few cells encode the valence of a stimulus in their individual responses, but paradoxically the valence can be decoded from the response of the population (Kyriazi, 2018). Extending the analogy, it is possible that the whole is more than the sum of its parts at the level of neural circuits. The premise of this research proposal is that the complexity of biological behavior necessitates an analysis of the coordination of activity of networks of circuits."
Edited:
"
For decades neuroscience has been progressing, studying cognition by mapping brain responses neuron by neuron, circuit by circuit. The zebrafish presents a radical model organism, because of its translucence which permits imaging the activity of the entire brain during learning and behavior. What kind of scientific mysteries can we elucidate with such a powerful experimental model? A question of intense interest in neuroscience is how animals learn to approach stimuli that they find pleasurable and avoid stimuli that are noxious.
Here we propose to characterize and model the dynamics of whole-brain networks while the juvenile fish learn predictive relationships between neutral, noxious and rewarding stimuli in its environment and alter their behavior in response to them."
This is fun!
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