260416_CMCB LSS - Prof. Mayank Mehta, W.M. Keck Center for Neurophysics at UCLA

Host: Federico Calegari (CRTD)

Title: "Hippocampus from virtual reality to reality: Space, time and memory"

Abstract: The hippocampus is implicated in many learning and memory disorders including Alzheimer's, and while dozens of drugs have cured these in mice, they all failed in humans. Hippocampal neurons in rodents show robust spatial selectivity, hence the standard test of hippocampal pathology in mice is the Morris Water Maze. However, hippocampal neurons show very little spatial selectivity in freely foraging primates and hippocampal damage in humans causes profound non-spatial, episodic memory deficits, whose neurophysiological analog in rodents is unclear. Our experiments in virtual reality and real-world tasks suggest a novel, unified theory of hippocampal function that can reconcile long-standing differences and improve translation from mice to humans.