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Translated sacred writings from various religious traditions often retain a few selected cultural terms borrowed from the incipient sign system, while other cultural dimensions are translated in ways that can broadly be construed as domestication. By contrast, many Bible translation agencies eschew translation strategies in which cultural terms are borrowed, advocating instead for wholesale domestication. In this article, we develop a theoretical framework for representing the alterity, but not the foreignness, of the Bible in translation. Alterity involves the incipient sign system, namely the biblical languages and their cultural contexts ranging from Iron Age Israel within the context of the Ancient Near East for the Old Testament to Roman Palestine in the first century for the New Testament. Examples from African contexts, including Afrikaans (South Africa), Lok (Nigeria) and Tira (Sudan), illustrate multiple approaches to representing alterity and provide an important corrective to current practice in many Bible translation projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominance of the King James Version (1611) began to fade in the late 19th century, when its language became too remote from standard English, leading to various revisions in both Britain and the United States. However, numerous English translations that are independent of the King James Version tradition and its revisions also emerged, specifically with the goal of producing translations in contemporary, accessible English. This article provides a historical narrative of the Bible translations in English, by focusing on the most important (authoritative, influential, or innovative) translations, independent of the continuing King James Version tradition, in order to explain how and why they were produced. Special attention is paid to the translational context within which the translations are produced, the translation process, and the strategies for rendering the cultural terms of the source texts in contemporary English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phasic variations in dopamine levels are interpreted as a teaching signal reinforcing rewarded behaviors. However, behavior also depends on the motivational, neuromodulatory effect of phasic dopamine. In this study, we reveal a neurodynamical principle that unifies these roles in a recurrent network-based decision architecture embodied through an action-perception loop with the task space, the MAGNet model. Dopamine optogenetic conditioning in mice was accounted for by an embodied network model in which attractors encode internal goals. Dopamine-dependent synaptic plasticity created "latent" attractors, to which dynamics converged, but only locally. Attractor basins were widened by dopamine-modulated synaptic excitability, rendering goals accessible globally, i.e. from distal positions. We validated these predictions optogenetically in mice: dopamine neuromodulation suddenly and specifically attracted animals toward rewarded locations, without off-target motor effects. We thus propose that motivational dopamine reveals dopamine-built attractors representing potential goals in a behavioral landscape., Competing Interests: Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

The neural mechanisms by which animals initiate goal-directed actions, choose between options, or explore opportunities remain unknown. Here, we develop a spatial gambling task in which mice, to obtain intracranial self-stimulation rewards, self-determine the initiation, direction, vigor, and pace of their actions based on their knowledge of the outcomes. Using electrophysiological recordings, pharmacology, and optogenetics, we identify a sequence of oscillations and firings in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), and prefrontal cortex (PFC) that co-encodes and co-determines self-initiation and choices. This sequence appeared with learning as an uncued realignment of spontaneous dynamics. Interactions between the structures varied with the reward context, particularly the uncertainty associated with the different options. We suggest that self-generated choices arise from a distributed circuit based on an OFC-VTA core determining whether to wait for or initiate actions, while the PFC is specifically engaged by reward uncertainty in action selection and pace., Competing Interests: Declaration of interests The authors declare no competing interests., (Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Classical Conditioning is a fundamental learning mechanism where the Ventral Striatum is generally thought to be the source of inhibition to Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA) Dopamine neurons when a reward is expected. However, recent evidences point to a new candidate in VTA GABA encoding expectation for computing the reward prediction error in the VTA. In this system-level computational model, the VTA GABA signal is hypothesised to be a combination of magnitude and timing computed in the Peduncolopontine and Ventral Striatum respectively. This dissociation enables the model to explain recent results wherein Ventral Striatum lesions affected the temporal expectation of the reward but the magnitude of the reward was intact. This model also exhibits other features in classical conditioning namely, progressively decreasing firing for early rewards closer to the actual reward, twin peaks of VTA dopamine during training and cancellation of US dopamine after training., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Long-term exposure to nicotine alters brain circuits and induces profound changes in decision-making strategies, affecting behaviors both related and unrelated to drug seeking and consumption. Using an intracranial self-stimulation reward-based foraging task, we investigated in mice the impact of chronic nicotine on midbrain dopamine neuron activity and its consequence on the trade-off between exploitation and exploration. Model-based and archetypal analysis revealed substantial inter-individual variability in decision-making strategies, with mice passively exposed to nicotine shifting toward a more exploitative profile compared to non-exposed animals. We then mimicked the effect of chronic nicotine on the tonic activity of dopamine neurons using optogenetics, and found that photo-stimulated mice adopted a behavioral phenotype similar to that of mice exposed to chronic nicotine. Our results reveal a key role of tonic midbrain dopamine in the exploration/exploitation trade-off and highlight a potential mechanism by which nicotine affects the exploration/exploitation balance and decision-making., (© 2021. The Author(s).)

Glucose is the mandatory fuel for the brain, yet the relative contribution of glucose and lactate for neuronal energy metabolism is unclear. We found that increased lactate, but not glucose concentration, enhances the spiking activity of neurons of the cerebral cortex. Enhanced spiking was dependent on ATP-sensitive potassium (K ATP ) channels formed with KCNJ11 and ABCC8 subunits, which we show are functionally expressed in most neocortical neuronal types. We also demonstrate the ability of cortical neurons to take-up and metabolize lactate. We further reveal that ATP is produced by cortical neurons largely via oxidative phosphorylation and only modestly by glycolysis. Our data demonstrate that in active neurons, lactate is preferred to glucose as an energy substrate, and that lactate metabolism shapes neuronal activity in the neocortex through K ATP channels. Our results highlight the importance of metabolic crosstalk between neurons and astrocytes for brain function., Competing Interests: AK, TG, AL, FP, JP, HG, RH, JN, BL, RE, BL, DL, JR, JS, HI, SS, JR, BC No competing interests declared, (© 2021, Karagiannis et al.)