Emotion profoundly shapes motor behavior: fear triggers freezing, escape, or defensive attack; reward facilitates approach; anger or dominance heightens confrontational readiness; while depression, apathy, or learned helplessness suppresses action initiation. Motor output can thus be viewed as the readout of the emotional system, dynamically influenced by expected reward, threat, urgency, effort, and internal drive. Elucidating how emotion modulates motion is the central objective of my lab. In this talk, I will present recent findings showing that lithium, the first-line mood stabilizer in psychiatry, biases motor actions in a manner that enhances animals’ survival probability. We identified the lateral habenula (LHb) as a key neural hub through which lithium exerts its effects. Usingin vivo electrophysiological recordings with silicon probes, we found that lithium significantly dampens population activity in the LHb. To better understand the correlation between LHb neural dynamics and motor action switches, we applied dynamical systems analysis to the recorded population activity. This approach yielded several testable hypotheses regarding how lithium reshapes the LHb neural landscape and alters its input dynamics. Notably, these hypotheses are consistent with lithium-induced changes in synaptic weight measured in acute LHb brain slices. Our findings demonstrate that neural dynamical systems analysis offers a powerful framework for linking molecular and synaptic function to behavior.
Organizer
Zhenyu Gao
z.gao@erasmusmc.nl