“…Nevertheless, some studies reported reduced basal or synaptic activity after chronic stress (Hu et al, 2010;Li et al, 2011;Quan et al, 2011a,b;Zhang et al, 2011). Most studies using field potential recordings found no change in basal synaptic responses (Bodnoff et al, 1995;Gerges et al, 2001;Pavlides et al, 2002;Alfarez et al, 2003;Aleisa et al, 2006a,b,c;Kessal et al, 2006;Holderbach et al, 2007;Goldwater et al, 2009;Srivareerat et al, 2009;but Dumas et al, 2010;Tran et al, 2011), possibly because the effects are too subtle to be noticed extracellularly or depend on GABAergic transmission (which is also not well captured with field potential recordings). Overall, nearly all studies demonstrate that several weeks of stress either enhance intrinsic/synaptically evoked cell activity or are ineffective in this respect, regardless of the area under investigation.…”