événements, séminaires
17 Mai 2024 – Mayank Mehta (Center for Physics of Life, UCLA) – Hippocampus 2.0
The hippocampus is implicated in many learning and memory disorders including
Alzheimer’s. Dozens of drugs have cured these in mice but failed in humans. Hippocampal
neurons in rodents show robust spatial selectivity. Hence, the standard test of
hippocampal function in mice is the Morris Water Maze, an allocentric spatial memory
task. However, hippocampal neurons show very little spatial selectivity in freely
foraging primates. Could this major difference across species play a role in the lack of
translation from rodents to primates? Indeed, hippocampal damage in humans causes
profound non-spatial, egocentric, episodic memory deficits, without any explicit spatial
component, whose neurophysiological analog in rodents has been unclear. Crucially, the
mechanisms governing these and a growing diversity of hippocampal responses, e.g. time
cells, head-direction cells, social cells etc. have remained unclear. We propose a novel
theory of hippocampal function, Hippocampus 2.0, which can reconcile and explain these
issues, and provide several experimental validations of this theory. The results provide
a novel, unified framework and experimental techniques for probing hippocampal function,
which could improve translation of therapies from mice to humans.
Salle de Conférence R229 – Campus Saint-Germain-des-Prés – Université Paris Cité, 45 rue des Saints-Pères, 75006 Paris – 17 Mai 2024 à 11h30