04/02/2026
🚨 NEW RESEARCH ALERT 🚨
A fascinating new study just published in The European Journal of Neuroscience sheds light on how the brain detects the unexpected—and what happens when this system is disrupted.
In this elegant multi-scale investigation, Carreño-Muñoz and colleagues (Université de Montréal & CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center) reveal that even low (sub-anesthetic) doses of ketamine significantly impair the brain’s ability to detect “oddball” sounds—those critical deviations from expected sensory patterns that we rely on to navigate the world.
Using cutting-edge electrophysiology in awake mice, the team shows that ketamine selectively disrupts:
🧠 **Mismatch Negativity (MMN)** responses
⚡ **Gamma-band oscillations linked to sensory encoding**
🔗 **Functional connectivity between auditory cortex and parietal cortex**
Strikingly, the work bridges cellular, population, and network-level mechanisms, providing rare insight into how NMDA receptor signaling supports predictive coding and novelty detection in the brain.
These findings have broad implications—from understanding psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and depression to refining models of predictive processing and cortical communication.
A must-read for anyone interested in sensory neuroscience, NMDA mechanisms, and brain network dynamics.
👏 Kudos to the authors for this outstanding contribution!
Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS)
Wiley
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ejn.70471 #
During an auditory deviance detection task, naïve mice and mice injected with sub-anesthetic ketamine show marked differences in spiking activity and mesoscale connectivity. Control mice exhibit a bi...
