Cortical and amygdalar neuronal ensembles in alcohol seeking, drinking and withdrawal.

Alcohol induces many alterations in the brain that are thought to contribute to alcohol addiction. Most of the known alterations are induced in all neurons of a brain area or all neurons of a given cell type, regardless of whether they were activated during behavior. While these alterations can have important modulatory effects on behavior, they cannot explain why animals respond specifically to alcohol-paired cues as opposed to all other non-paired cues, and evoke highly specific goal-directed learned responses in models of drug craving. As an alternative, we hypothesize another class of alterations that are induced only within sparsely distributed patterns of neurons, called neuronal ensembles, that are selectively activated by alcohol-specific cues during behavior and encode the long-term memories underlying these learned behaviors in animal models of alcohol addiction. Here we review recent studies and techniques used to identify the role of neuronal ensembles in animal models of different phases of the alcohol addiction cycle.

酒精会引起大脑的许多变化，这些变化被认为与酒精成瘾有关。大多数已知的变化是在大脑某个区域的所有神经元或某种特定细胞类型的所有神经元中产生的，无论它们在行为过程中是否被激活。虽然这些变化对行为有重要的调节作用，但它们无法解释为什么动物会对与酒精配对的线索有特定反应，而不是对所有其他未配对的线索有反应，以及为什么在药物渴求模型中会引发高度特定的目标导向的习得性反应。作为一种替代解释，我们假设存在另一类变化，这类变化仅在神经元的稀疏分布模式（称为神经元集群）中产生，这些神经元集群在行为过程中会被酒精特异性线索选择性激活，并在酒精成瘾的动物模型中对这些习得行为背后的长期记忆进行编码。在这里，我们回顾了用于确定神经元集群在酒精成瘾周期不同阶段的动物模型中所起作用的近期研究和技术。