Past events

Nonoscillatory coding and multiscale representation of very large environments in the bat hippocampus Abstract: The hippocampus plays a key role in memory and navigation, and forms a cognitive map of the world: hippocampal ‘place cells’ encode the animal’s location by activating whenever the animal passes a particular region in the environment (the neuron’s ‘place field’). Over the last 50 years of hippocampal research, almost all studies have focused on rodents as animal models, using small laboratory experimental setups. In my research, I explored hippocampal representations in a naturalistic settings, in a unique animal model – the bat. My talk will outline two main stories: (i) In rodents, hippocampal activity exhibits ‘theta oscillations’. These oscillations were proposed to support multiple functions, including memory and sequence formation. However, absence of clear theta in bats and humans has questioned these proposals. Surprisingly, we found that in bats hippocampal neurons exhibited nonoscillatory phase-coding. This highlights the importance of phase-coding, but not oscillations per se, for hippocampal function across species – including humans. (ii) Real-world navigation requires spatial representation of very large environments. To investigate this, we wirelessly recorded from hippocampal dorsal CA1 neurons of bats flying in a long tunnel (200 meters). Place cells displayed a multifield multiscale code: Individual neurons exhibited multiple place fields of diverse sizes, ranging from 0.6 to 32 meters, and the fields of the same neuron differed up to 20-fold in size. Theoretical analysis showed that the multiscale code allows representing large environments with much better accuracy than other codes. Thus, by increasing the spatial scale, we uncovered a neural code that is radically different from classical spatial codes. Together, these results highlight the power of the comparative approach, and demonstrate that studying the brain under naturalistic settings and behavior enables discovering new unknown aspects of the neural code. There is Chemistry in Social Chemistry Abstract: Non-human terrestrial mammals constantly sniff themselves and each-other, and based on this decide who is friend or foe. Humans also constantly sniff themselves and each-other, but the functional significance of this behavior is unknown. Given that humans seek friends who are similar to themselves, we hypothesized that humans may be smelling themselves and others to subconsciously estimate body-odor similarity, and that this may then promote friendship. To test this hypothesis, we recruited non-romantic same-sex friend dyads who had initially bonded instantaneously, or so called click-friends, and harvested their body-odor. In a series of experiments, we then found that objective ratings obtained with an electronic nose, and subjective ratings obtained from independent human smellers, converged to suggest that click-friends smell more similar to each other than random dyads. To then estimate whether this similarity was merely a consequence of friendship, or a driving force of friendship, we recruited complete strangers, smelled them with an electronic nose, and engaged them in non-verbal same-sex dyadic interactions. Remarkably, we observed that dyads who smelled more similar had better dyadic interactions. In other words, we could predict social bonding with an electronic nose. This result implies that body-odor similarity is a causal factor in social interaction, or in other words, there is indeed chemistry in social chemistry.

Our everyday conscious memories are an intricate network of images and associations, constituting a record of our personal experiences that is continuously updated through an active organization of new information within the context of previous experience. Recollection is similarly recreative, and the course of remembering is determined by the nature of our memory organization. This type of memory is called episodic memory, and is therefore a multifaceted process involving a synthesis of episodic representations with our framework of general semantic knowledge that mediates our capacity for recollection. It is therefore typically considered to be too complex to be described by physics-style universal mathematical laws. In this thesis we characterize some of the processes governing episodic recall and point out the basic principles behind them. More specifically, we propose a search process governing recall of unconnected events, mathematically computed recall capacity and tested the resulting relationship in dedicated experiments. Next, we proposed how structured information may be encoded in the human brain and compared model predictions with available experimental data. In both cases experimental data were consistent with proposed mechanisms. Since time is an essential part of episodic memory we also studied the interaction between absolute and ordinal time representation in the brain. We found that ordinal information take precedence in the inference about absolute event times. Overall, the results presented in this thesis opens opportunity that complicated cognitive processes can be described by universal mathematical laws. Zoom link to join: https://weizmann.zoom.us/j/99774936375?pwd=QUhMTG56UkJkd3l1bUJ1ZDhhTTlEUT09 Meeting ID: 997 7493 6375 Password: 402616