Phencyclidine Discoordinates Hippocampal Network Activity But Not Place Fields.
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience December 6, 2017 Hsin-Yi Kao, Dino Dvořák, Eunhye Park et al.
The psychotomimetic drug phencyclidine (PCP) impairs a learned hippocampus-dependent place avoidance behavior in rats, even when injected directly into the dorsal hippocampus. PCP increases 60-100 Hz gamma oscillations in hippocampal CA1, and these increases correlate with cognitive impairment. PCP disrupts the coordination between theta-modulated medium-frequency and slow gamma oscillations, and it disrupts the subsecond temporal organization of discharge among place cells, causing ensemble representations of a familiar space to cease resembling pre-PCP representations despite preserved place fields. These findings indicate that PCP-induced cognitive impairments arise from neural discoordination, specifically excitation-inhibition discoordination, rather than from disruption of place fields themselves.