Optical Interrogation of Neural Circuits - Raffa and I

The technique allows us to interrogate neural circuits at the spatial temporal complexity and richness of the dynamics that they use to function. And we've seen a lot of interesting work, for example, Chris Harvey published a beautiful paper last year where they stimulate one neuron and ask what is the impact on all the other neurons nearby? We've also done a similar thing by stimulating a visual cortex with an optogenetics-based photo Stimulator. It's really cool that you basically set up this recipe that any lab in the world with the correct resources can can use. But how do you think it will improve our understanding in the future? Yeah, that's a very good question.