AUTHOR=Pandarinath Chethan, Bomash Illya, Victor Jonathan, Prusky Glen, Tschetter Wayne, Nirenberg Sheila TITLE=A novel mechanism for switching a neural system from one state to another JOURNAL=Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience VOLUME=4 YEAR=2010 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2010.00002 DOI=10.3389/fncom.2010.00002 ISSN=1662-5188 ABSTRACT=An animal's ability to rapidly adjust to new conditions is essential to its survival. The nervous system, then, must be built with the flexibility to adjust, or shift, its processing capabilities on the fly. To understand how this flexibility comes about, we tracked a well-known behavioral shift, a visual integration shift, down to its underlying circuitry, and found that it is produced by a novel mechanism – a change in gap junction coupling that can turn a cell class on and off. The results showed that the turning on and off of a cell class shifted the circuit's behavior from one state to another, and, likewise, the animal's behavior. The widespread presence of similar gap junction-coupled networks in the brain suggests that this mechanism may underlie other behavioral shifts as well.