Summary: The OpenScope program is investigating neural activity through four new projects that examine psilocybin’s effects, motion perception, visual texture recognition, and how the brain registers subtle changes in appearance.
Using state-of-the-art imaging and recording techniques in mice, researchers will map how neurons and neural circuits support these complex functions. OpenScope provides open, global access to the resulting neuroscience data, enabling broader discovery and accelerating progress toward understanding and treating brain disorders.
Key Facts:
- Psychedelic Effects: Cellular-level studies of how psilocybin alters neural activity.
- Visual Perception: Experiments probing motion processing and texture recognition in the visual cortex.
- Open Science: OpenScope shares high-quality experimental data worldwide to support collaborative neuroscience.
Source: Allen Institute
How do neurons respond to psilocybin? What circuit mechanisms let us perceive motion or identify fine grain patterns in wood? How does the brain track the subtle, gradual changes in a person’s appearance over time?
To address these questions, the Allen Institute has launched four OpenScope projects that invite researchers to design and direct experiments using the Allen Brain Observatory pipeline. OpenScope operates like a shared observatory for neuroscience: instead of having each lab build its own large-scale infrastructure, investigators worldwide can propose experiments that run on a centralized, high-capacity platform.
All data and results produced by OpenScope are made freely available to the global research community to help answer open questions about neural activity in health and disease.
Now in its sixth year, OpenScope aims to “pioneer a new model in neuroscience,” said Jérôme Lecoq, Ph.D., associate investigator at the Allen Institute. “Our platform enhances data acquisition and global sharing while empowering individual labs to leverage it for their own scientific questions,” Lecoq said. He co-leads OpenScope with Christof Koch.
“We’re combining focused questions from passionate teams with a sophisticated, experienced experimental platform,” Lecoq added. “This is our vision for the future of neuroscience.”
Psychedelic science
One 2024 OpenScope project will investigate how psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in so-called “magic mushrooms,” modifies brain activity at the cellular level. While psilocybin is known to induce profound changes in human perception and cognition, its detailed effects on neural signaling and circuit dynamics remain incompletely understood.
Using high-resolution recording methods in mice, researchers will observe how neuronal communication changes under psilocybin and whether those changes alter the brain’s ability to process and predict sensory inputs. These mechanisms are fundamental to how perception is constructed, so understanding them could illuminate broader principles of cognition and consciousness.
“Our interest goes beyond clinical potential,” said Roberto de Filippo, Ph.D., postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin. “Revealing the biological mechanisms behind these compounds can inform our basic understanding of perception, cognition, and consciousness.”
This study is led by Roberto de Filippo, Torben Ott, Ph.D., and Dietmar Schmitz, Ph.D.
How the past subtly shapes our perception
We often fail to notice gradual changes in familiar people until we see an old photograph or meet them after a long absence. Despite being nearly imperceptible moment to moment, those changes are continuously incorporated into our memories and influence future perception.
A 2024 OpenScope project will examine how the visual system updates those stored representations. Using the Allen Brain Observatory’s shared platform, researchers will analyze neural activity in mice to determine how visual memories influence current perception and how different brain areas contribute to updating and predicting sensory experience.
Historically, the visual system was seen as primarily processing incoming sensory signals. Recent findings indicate it also stores visual information and uses past experience to predict what will be seen next. This project will test how memory-based predictions affect flexibility in visual processing—whether prior exposure makes the system more adaptable or more rigid when encountering new information.
The team leading this effort includes Yaniv Ziv, Ph.D., Daniel Deitch, Alon Rubin, Ph.D., and Itay Talpir from the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Deciphering motion perception
How does the brain recognize and represent moving objects? This OpenScope project aims to clarify the circuits that underlie motion perception by tracking activity across many neurons in different visual cortex regions over multiple weeks.
Although prior work has mapped regions responsive to various motion types, the precise neural circuitry and cell-type-specific representations remain unclear. By combining longitudinal imaging with cell-type identification, the project seeks to define how motion information is encoded and routed across cortical areas—insights that may apply broadly across the cortex.
“Understanding how these circuits encode information in the visual system could reveal principles that generalize across the brain,” said Julia Veit, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Freiburg. This project is led by Veit, Henning Sprekeler, Ph.D., and Yael Oran, Ph.D.
Recognizing visual textures
Our brains effortlessly recognize a vast array of complex textures—from the patterns on butterfly wings to the grain in wood—but the neural computations that support this ability are not fully understood.
In this OpenScope experiment, mice will be trained to discriminate textures while researchers record neural activity in the visual cortex, linking specific response patterns to perceptual choices. The goals are to identify why certain textures are easily recognized, how others are challenging, and how distributed brain regions transform visual inputs into meaningful representations that guide behavior.
These findings could reveal core principles of how the brain extracts structured information from patterned visual scenes. Because the project’s scale exceeds what a typical lab can accomplish alone, the Allen Brain Observatory’s infrastructure will allow broader scope, standardized methods, and direct comparison with other OpenScope studies.
“Moving systems neuroscience toward a collaborative, community-driven model—similar to high-energy physics or astronomy—will accelerate progress,” said Federico Bolaños, Ph.D., lead data scientist at the University of British Columbia. The texture project is led by Bolaños, Timothy Murphy, Ph.D., and Javier Orlandi, Ph.D.
Funding: Research described here was supported by award number U24NS113646 from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH and its subsidiary institutes.
About this open science and neuroscience research news
Author: Peter Kim
Source: Allen Institute
Contact: Peter Kim – Allen Institute
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News