Investigating the effects of nicotine on hippocampal oscillations in rats

It has been widely proposed that, higher cognitive functions such as learning, memory, attention and exploratory behavior could be represented in the CA1 region of the hippocampal area of the brain by a distributed neuronal network synchronization on an oscillatory mode as the gamma-band or 40 Hz (30-80 Hz) oscillations. In this paper, we have studied the effect of nicotine on the dynamics of the neurons and the complexity of the activity of the gamma oscillations in the CA1 cell line on the hippocampal slices using the approximate entropy method. Our results suggest that nicotine exposure significantly enhances the activity of the hippocampal neurons by reducing the complexity of gamma oscillations.