Neurons with modalities clearly equivalent to those of visceral sensory neurons in vertebrates (which monitor taste or blood pressure for example) are not described to our knowledge in mollusks, precluding exploration of this broad neuronal identity.
This molecule is essential for long-term potentiation of the neuron and various modalities of learning such as spatial memory and fear conditioning.
In different sensory modalities, neurons which process closely related sensory information are contiguous.
As recently proposed (Estacion et al., 2011; Waxman, 2013), PEM symptoms might result from interactions between sympathetic and sensory neurons and so treatment modalities focused on altering neuronal excitability in the dorsal root ganglia alone may be either ineffective or only partially beneficial.
In combination with the possibility of experimenting on the role of single neurons in different functional modalities, these invariances allow one to uniquely identify the important neurons in the system having specific behavioral tasks.
Nociceptive-specific neurons in S1 are sparse and intermingled with neurons of other sensory modalities.
Most neurons that respond to a binocular light stimulus are located on the left, and most neurons that respond to an odor stimulus are located on the right, with very few neurons responding to both modalities.
Finally, single-cell resolution calcium imaging revealed a gradual merging of modalities: unisensory neurons had higher densities toward the borders of the primary cortices, but were located in unimodal clusters in the middle of the cortical area.
The ubiquity of non Gaussian signals in nature, particularly of the exponential distributions considered here, suggests that these results might be relevant for neurons across different sensory modalities.
It will be important to see if it can survive more extensive neurophysiological tests, in particular including data from neurons in the ventral pathway in visual cortex, such as those in area V4, as well as neurons in other sensory modalities and higher cortical areas.
Morphological, electrophysiological and genetic studies have provided evidence for specificity of peripheral nociceptive and non-nociceptive sensory neurons for distinct sensory modalities.
