Genes 2 Brains 2 Mind 2 Me

Everyone has a birthday right. Its the day you (your infant self) popped into the world and started breathing, right?  But what about the day “you” were born – that is – “you” in the more philosophical, Jungian, spiritual, social, etc. kind of a way when you became aware of being in some ways apart from others and the world around you.  In her 1997 paper, “The Basal Ganglia and Cognitive Pattern Generators“, Professor Ann Graybiel writes,

The link between intent and action may also have a quite specific function during development. This set of circuits may provide part of the neural mechanism for building up cognitive patterns involving recognition of the self. It is well documented that, as voluntary motor behaviors develop and as feedback about the consequences of these behaviors occurs, the perceptuomotor world of the infant develops (Gibson 1969). These same correlations among intent, action, and consequence also offer a simple way for the young organism to acquire the distinction between actively initiated and passively received events. As a result, the infant can acquire the recognition of self as actor. The iterative nature of many basal ganglia connections and the apparent involvement of the basal ganglia in some forms of learning could provide a mechanism for this development of self-awareness.

As Professor Graybiel relates the “self” to function in the basal-ganglia and the so-called cortico-thalamic basal-ganglia loops – a set of parallel circuits that help to properly filter internal mental activity into specific actions and executable decisions – I got a kick out of a paper that describes how the development of the basal-ganglia can go awry for cells that are born at certain times.

Check out the paper, “Modular patterning of structure and function of the striatum by retinoid receptor signaling” by Liao et al.   It reveals that mice who lack a certain retinoic acid receptor gene (RARbeta) have a type of defective neurogenesis in late-born cells that make up a part of the basal ganglia (striatum) known as a striosome.  Normally, the authors say, retinoic acid helps to expand a population of late-born striosomal cells, but in the RARbeta mutant mice, the rostral striosomes remain under-developed.   When given dopaminergic stimulation, these mutant mice showed slightly less grooming and more sterotypic behaviors.

So when was “my self’s” birthday?  Was it when these late-born striosomal cells were, umm, born?  Who knows, but I’m glad my retinoic acid system was intact.