Discovery leads to schizophrenia questions

UC Irvine researchers have discovered that an unfamiliar link between auditory brain cells plays a vital role in sound cognition, a finding that could have widespread implications in the way scientists study sensory information processing in the brain.

Raju Metherate, the author of the study, published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience magazine, and fellow researchers Hideki Kawai and Ronit Lazar, found that the axon, the insulated hair-like fibers transmitting impulses from one cell to another, not only serves as a connection, but also as a regulator for information going through.

“This discovery was huge,” Metherate said. “This is a part of the brain that was thought did not do cognitive processes.”

The idea of the axon doing more than transporting information between brain cells is a novel one and could lead to more research on what role it may play in psychological disorders such as schizophrenia.

For those not familiar with neurobiology jargon, Metherate put it this way:

Imagine speaking into a landline telephone. When a person speaks into the handset, the sound waves are transferred into electrical energy, which flow through the phone cords to the handset the other person is listening to. When the electrical signal gets there, it is converted into the sound we hear coming through the earpiece.

Metherate’s team discovered that besides the volume controls on either party’s phone, the brain also has a volume control on the phone cord itself, or the axon.

“The result of our study suggests that we must consider the axons as sites of information processing — and of potential problems when things go wrong,” Metherate said.

Brain cells have dozens of dendrites and one axon which branches off, all sending and receiving information at the same time. What you get is one immensely complex network of electrical impulses and chemical reactions. Any kind of irregularity can be a symptom of a psychological disorder.

Schizophrenics, for example, sometimes have trouble hearing a person’s voice inflection, making it hard for them to tell if someone is happy or mad.