All years
, All years
ZOOM seminar: Sleep-related memory consolidation in humans: beyond single, isolated memories
Lecture
Sunday, December 26, 2021
Hour: 12:30 - 13:30
Location:
ZOOM seminar: Sleep-related memory consolidation in humans: beyond single, isolated memories
Dr. Eitan Schechtman
Northwestern University,
Evanston, Illinois
Sleep is critical for the stabilization of memories. This process is thought to be supported by the reactivation of memories, thereby strengthening the neural infrastructure supporting them. Theoretical accounts of this consolidation process focus on the process through which memories are independently strengthened, but in natural settings individual memories never exist in a vacuum. In this talk, I will present a series of studies exploring the extent of memory reactivation during sleep in humans, how interactions between memories impact the consolidation process, and the role of encoding context in memory processing during sleep. The main technique used to explore memory reactivation in these studies is targeted memory reactivation, a behavioral manipulation that can selectively bias consolidation during sleep. The results demonstrate that multiple semantically related memories can be simultaneously consolidated during sleep. Additionally, they show that memory reactivation during sleep may involve contextual reinstatement, thereby impacting multiple contextually linked memories. These data suggest that reactivation during sleep is not limited to single memory items, and can occur at the network or brain-state level. Relatedly, we show that reactivating a suppression state during sleep can be used to selectively weaken memories. Taken together, these results inform our current understanding regarding memory consolidation processes and open new avenues for translatable research to alleviate memory-related symptoms in patients suffering from psychiatric disorders.
Quantitative Tools for Neuroscience Questions
Lecture
Wednesday, December 22, 2021
Hour: 12:30 - 13:30
Location:
Arthur and Rochelle Belfer Building for Biomedical Research
Quantitative Tools for Neuroscience Questions
Dr. Ari Pakman
Department of Statistics & the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience,
Columbia University
As bigger neuroscience datasets are generated with novel observation modalities, so grows the need for computational tools to answer basic questions. What different types of neurons exist in a population? How to sort out neurons from their electric activity? How do neurons process information? I will present statistical, machine learning and information-theoretic tools that address such questions. In particular, I will discuss new solutions to the problem of classifying neuron types using genetic markers, amortizing spike-sorting in modern multi-electrode arrays and disentangling the simultaneous presence of synergy and redundancy in neural information processing circuits.
Zoom seminar: The role of noncanonical hippocampal circuits in memory
Lecture
Tuesday, December 21, 2021
Hour: 12:30 - 13:30
Location:
Zoom seminar: The role of noncanonical hippocampal circuits in memory
Prof. Thomas McHugh
Laboratory for Circuit and Behavioral Physiology
RIKEN Center for Brain Science, Japan
The human hippocampus plays a crucial role in episodic memory; the who, what, where memories that define our lives. In the rodent, well-defined anatomy and physiology make the structure an ideal model system; amenable to circuit manipulations and observations designed to test hypotheses concerning how memories are formed and used. Here I will present our recent work in mice which combines anatomical characterization, genetic interventions and in vivo recording to address how noncononical inputs and outputs influence information flow in the hippocampus. I will first introduce our study identifying a novelty signaling hub in the hypothalamus – the supramammillary nucleus (SuM). Unique about this region is that it not only responds broadly to novel stimuli, but segregates and selectively routes different types of information to discrete cortical targets, the dentate gyrus (DG) and CA2 fields of the hippocampus, for the modulation of mnemonic processing. Next, I will describe ongoing work focused on how CA2’s output impacts both local and distal circuits, including our identification and characterization of a novel descending glutamatergic projection from CA2 pyramidal cells to PV+ neurons in the MS that can regulate cholinergic tone and hippocampal memory.
Zoom link:
https://weizmann.zoom.us/j/95406893197?pwd=REt5L1g3SmprMUhrK3dpUDJVeHlrZz09
Meeting ID: 954 0689 3197
Password: 750421
Neuron-glia interactions in neurodevelopmental disorders: from basic research to a clinical trial
Lecture
Tuesday, December 14, 2021
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Neuron-glia interactions in neurodevelopmental disorders: from basic research to a clinical trial
Dr. Boaz Barak
School of Psychological Sciences and Sagol School of Neuroscience,
Tel Aviv University
Neuron-glia interactions are key for proper myelination in the brain and for its functionality. To study neuron-glia interaction roles in brain development we focus on the genetic disorder Williams syndrome (WS). WS is a multisystemic neurodevelopmental disorder caused by a de-novo hemizygous deletion of ~26 genes from chromosome 7q11.23. We previously revealed surprising aberrations in myelination and brain development in a novel mouse model for the hypersociability phenotype associated with WS, as a result of a neuronal deletion of the transcription factor Gtf2i, which is one of the genes deleted in WS. In this talk, I will present our recent findings focused on altered white matter and brain development in WS, and discuss potential molecular and cellular explanations for the neurodevelopmental deficits in WS. Specifically, I will present evidence for mitochondrial dysfunction in neurons, and what are the microglial responses to the resultant myelination deficits. Furthermore, to study the implication of our studies from mouse models on human condition, I will show our new data on the altered epigenome of human frontal cortex tissue from WS compared to controls. Finally, I will present our approaches to develop new therapeutic approaches and will update on our clinical trial focused on ameliorating white matter deficits in WS.
Hybrid seminar
Zoom link:
https://weizmann.zoom.us/j/95406893197?pwd=REt5L1g3SmprMUhrK3dpUDJVeHlrZz09
Meeting ID: 954 0689 3197
Password: 750421
Memory consolidation during sleep: Mechanisms and representations
Lecture
Tuesday, December 7, 2021
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Memory consolidation during sleep: Mechanisms and representations
Bernhard Staresina
Department of Experimental Psychology
Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN)
University of Oxford UK
How do we strengthen memories while we sleep? In this talk, I will first focus on the question of how different sleep signatures (slow oscillations, spindles and ripples) interact and facilitate hippocampal-neocortical information transfer. I will then present recent data on actual memory content being reactivated during sleep – both naturally (endogenously) and experimentally (exogenously).
Zoom link:
https://weizmann.zoom.us/j/95406893197?pwd=REt5L1g3SmprMUhrK3dpUDJVeHlrZz09
Meeting ID: 954 0689 3197
Password: 750421
Neurobiology of Social and Sickness Behaviors
Lecture
Sunday, November 28, 2021
Hour: 14:00 - 15:15
Location:
Neurobiology of Social and Sickness Behaviors
Prof. Catherine Dulac
Howard Hughes Medical InstituteDept of Molecular and Cellular BiologyHarvard University, Cambridge MA
Social interactions are essential for animals to survive, reproduce, raise their young. Over the years, my lab has attempted to decipher the unique characteristics of social recognition: what are the unique cues that trigger distinct social behaviors, what is the nature and identity of social behavior circuits, how is the function of these circuits different in males and females and how are they modulated by the animal physiological status? In this lecture, I will describe our recent progress in understanding how different parts of the brain participate in the positive and negative control of parental behavior in males and females, providing a new framework to understand the regulation of adult-infant interactions in health and disease. I will also describe how new approaches in in situ single cell transcript
omics have enabled us to uncover specific hypothalamic cell populations involved in distinct social behaviors. Finally, I will describe our most recent work uncovering how specific brain circuits are able to direct adaptive changes in behavior during sickness episodes in mice.
Host: Dr. Takashi Kawashima takashi.kawashima@weizmann.ac.il tel: 2995
“Deep Internal learning” -- Deep Learning and Visual inference without prior examples
Lecture
Tuesday, November 23, 2021
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
“Deep Internal learning” -- Deep Learning and Visual inference without prior examples
Prof. Michal Irani
Dept of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, WIS
In the first part of my talk I will show how complex visual inference tasks can be performed with Deep-Learning, in a totally unsupervised way, by training on a single image -- the test image alone. The strong recurrence of information inside a single natural image provides powerful internal examples which suffice for self-supervision of Deep-Networks, without any prior examples or training data. This new paradigm gives rise to true “Zero-Shot Learning”. I will show the power of this approach to a variety of visual tasks, including super-resolution, image-segmentation, transparent layer separation, image-dehazing, and more.
In the second part of my talk I will show how self-supervision can be used for “Mind-Reading” (recovering observed visual information from fMRI brain recordings), when only very few fMRI training examples are available.
Brain borders at the central stage of neuroimmunology
Lecture
Thursday, November 18, 2021
Hour: 14:00 - 15:00
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Brain borders at the central stage of neuroimmunology
Prof. Jonathan Kipnis
Director, Center for Brain Immunology and Glia (BIG)
Washington University in St. Louis, MO
Firing Rate Homeostasis in Neural Circuits: From basic principles to malfunctions
Lecture
Tuesday, November 9, 2021
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Firing Rate Homeostasis in Neural Circuits: From basic principles to malfunctions
Prof. Inna Slutsky
Head, Dept of Physiology and Pharmacology
Sackler Faculty of Medicine,
Tel Aviv University
Maintaining average activity level within a set-point range constitutes a fundamental property of central neural circuits. Accumulated evidence suggests that firing rate distributions and their means represent physiological variables regulated by homeostatic systems. Utilizing basic concepts of control theory, we developed a theoretical and experimental framework for identifying the core members of homeostatic machinery. I will describe an integrative approach to study the relationships between ongoing spiking activity of individual neurons and neuronal populations in local microcircuits, synaptic transmission and plasticity, sleep and memory functions. I will show our new data on a state-dependent regulation of firing rate set-points, their dysregulation at the presymptomatic stage of Alzheimer’s disease, and the role of mitochondria in these processes.
Brain-wide networks underlying behavior - Insights from functional ultrasound imaging
Lecture
Tuesday, November 2, 2021
Hour: 12:30 - 13:30
Location:
Brain-wide networks underlying behavior - Insights from functional ultrasound imaging
Dr. Emilie Macé
Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Martinsried, Germany
Functional ultrasound imaging (fUS) is an emerging neuroimaging tool capable of measuring brain-wide vascular signals linked to neuronal activity with a high spatial-temporal resolution (100 µm, 10 Hz) in real-time. This technology is portable, affordable and adaptable to many species, and has already found applications in areas ranging from basic research to the clinic. Focusing on fundamental neuroscience, I will outline some of the recent technical advancements of fUS, such as the capacity to image the entire rodent brain while manipulating specific neuronal circuits with optogenetics. I will exemplify how promising this imaging technique is for shedding new light on the brain-wide circuits underlying behavior, as fUS is one of the few methods that enables imaging of activity deep in the brain of behaving mice.
Zoom link: https://weizmann.zoom.us/j/95406893197?pwd=REt5L1g3SmprMUhrK3dpUDJVeHlrZz09
Meeting ID: 954 0689 3197
Password: 750421
Pages
All years
, All years
Quantitative Tools for Neuroscience Questions
Lecture
Wednesday, December 22, 2021
Hour: 12:30 - 13:30
Location:
Arthur and Rochelle Belfer Building for Biomedical Research
Quantitative Tools for Neuroscience Questions
Dr. Ari Pakman
Department of Statistics & the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience,
Columbia University
As bigger neuroscience datasets are generated with novel observation modalities, so grows the need for computational tools to answer basic questions. What different types of neurons exist in a population? How to sort out neurons from their electric activity? How do neurons process information? I will present statistical, machine learning and information-theoretic tools that address such questions. In particular, I will discuss new solutions to the problem of classifying neuron types using genetic markers, amortizing spike-sorting in modern multi-electrode arrays and disentangling the simultaneous presence of synergy and redundancy in neural information processing circuits.
Zoom seminar: The role of noncanonical hippocampal circuits in memory
Lecture
Tuesday, December 21, 2021
Hour: 12:30 - 13:30
Location:
Zoom seminar: The role of noncanonical hippocampal circuits in memory
Prof. Thomas McHugh
Laboratory for Circuit and Behavioral Physiology
RIKEN Center for Brain Science, Japan
The human hippocampus plays a crucial role in episodic memory; the who, what, where memories that define our lives. In the rodent, well-defined anatomy and physiology make the structure an ideal model system; amenable to circuit manipulations and observations designed to test hypotheses concerning how memories are formed and used. Here I will present our recent work in mice which combines anatomical characterization, genetic interventions and in vivo recording to address how noncononical inputs and outputs influence information flow in the hippocampus. I will first introduce our study identifying a novelty signaling hub in the hypothalamus – the supramammillary nucleus (SuM). Unique about this region is that it not only responds broadly to novel stimuli, but segregates and selectively routes different types of information to discrete cortical targets, the dentate gyrus (DG) and CA2 fields of the hippocampus, for the modulation of mnemonic processing. Next, I will describe ongoing work focused on how CA2’s output impacts both local and distal circuits, including our identification and characterization of a novel descending glutamatergic projection from CA2 pyramidal cells to PV+ neurons in the MS that can regulate cholinergic tone and hippocampal memory.
Zoom link:
https://weizmann.zoom.us/j/95406893197?pwd=REt5L1g3SmprMUhrK3dpUDJVeHlrZz09
Meeting ID: 954 0689 3197
Password: 750421
Neuron-glia interactions in neurodevelopmental disorders: from basic research to a clinical trial
Lecture
Tuesday, December 14, 2021
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Neuron-glia interactions in neurodevelopmental disorders: from basic research to a clinical trial
Dr. Boaz Barak
School of Psychological Sciences and Sagol School of Neuroscience,
Tel Aviv University
Neuron-glia interactions are key for proper myelination in the brain and for its functionality. To study neuron-glia interaction roles in brain development we focus on the genetic disorder Williams syndrome (WS). WS is a multisystemic neurodevelopmental disorder caused by a de-novo hemizygous deletion of ~26 genes from chromosome 7q11.23. We previously revealed surprising aberrations in myelination and brain development in a novel mouse model for the hypersociability phenotype associated with WS, as a result of a neuronal deletion of the transcription factor Gtf2i, which is one of the genes deleted in WS. In this talk, I will present our recent findings focused on altered white matter and brain development in WS, and discuss potential molecular and cellular explanations for the neurodevelopmental deficits in WS. Specifically, I will present evidence for mitochondrial dysfunction in neurons, and what are the microglial responses to the resultant myelination deficits. Furthermore, to study the implication of our studies from mouse models on human condition, I will show our new data on the altered epigenome of human frontal cortex tissue from WS compared to controls. Finally, I will present our approaches to develop new therapeutic approaches and will update on our clinical trial focused on ameliorating white matter deficits in WS.
Hybrid seminar
Zoom link:
https://weizmann.zoom.us/j/95406893197?pwd=REt5L1g3SmprMUhrK3dpUDJVeHlrZz09
Meeting ID: 954 0689 3197
Password: 750421
Memory consolidation during sleep: Mechanisms and representations
Lecture
Tuesday, December 7, 2021
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Memory consolidation during sleep: Mechanisms and representations
Bernhard Staresina
Department of Experimental Psychology
Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN)
University of Oxford UK
How do we strengthen memories while we sleep? In this talk, I will first focus on the question of how different sleep signatures (slow oscillations, spindles and ripples) interact and facilitate hippocampal-neocortical information transfer. I will then present recent data on actual memory content being reactivated during sleep – both naturally (endogenously) and experimentally (exogenously).
Zoom link:
https://weizmann.zoom.us/j/95406893197?pwd=REt5L1g3SmprMUhrK3dpUDJVeHlrZz09
Meeting ID: 954 0689 3197
Password: 750421
Neurobiology of Social and Sickness Behaviors
Lecture
Sunday, November 28, 2021
Hour: 14:00 - 15:15
Location:
Neurobiology of Social and Sickness Behaviors
Prof. Catherine Dulac
Howard Hughes Medical InstituteDept of Molecular and Cellular BiologyHarvard University, Cambridge MA
Social interactions are essential for animals to survive, reproduce, raise their young. Over the years, my lab has attempted to decipher the unique characteristics of social recognition: what are the unique cues that trigger distinct social behaviors, what is the nature and identity of social behavior circuits, how is the function of these circuits different in males and females and how are they modulated by the animal physiological status? In this lecture, I will describe our recent progress in understanding how different parts of the brain participate in the positive and negative control of parental behavior in males and females, providing a new framework to understand the regulation of adult-infant interactions in health and disease. I will also describe how new approaches in in situ single cell transcript
omics have enabled us to uncover specific hypothalamic cell populations involved in distinct social behaviors. Finally, I will describe our most recent work uncovering how specific brain circuits are able to direct adaptive changes in behavior during sickness episodes in mice.
Host: Dr. Takashi Kawashima takashi.kawashima@weizmann.ac.il tel: 2995
“Deep Internal learning” -- Deep Learning and Visual inference without prior examples
Lecture
Tuesday, November 23, 2021
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
“Deep Internal learning” -- Deep Learning and Visual inference without prior examples
Prof. Michal Irani
Dept of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, WIS
In the first part of my talk I will show how complex visual inference tasks can be performed with Deep-Learning, in a totally unsupervised way, by training on a single image -- the test image alone. The strong recurrence of information inside a single natural image provides powerful internal examples which suffice for self-supervision of Deep-Networks, without any prior examples or training data. This new paradigm gives rise to true “Zero-Shot Learning”. I will show the power of this approach to a variety of visual tasks, including super-resolution, image-segmentation, transparent layer separation, image-dehazing, and more.
In the second part of my talk I will show how self-supervision can be used for “Mind-Reading” (recovering observed visual information from fMRI brain recordings), when only very few fMRI training examples are available.
Brain borders at the central stage of neuroimmunology
Lecture
Thursday, November 18, 2021
Hour: 14:00 - 15:00
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Brain borders at the central stage of neuroimmunology
Prof. Jonathan Kipnis
Director, Center for Brain Immunology and Glia (BIG)
Washington University in St. Louis, MO
Firing Rate Homeostasis in Neural Circuits: From basic principles to malfunctions
Lecture
Tuesday, November 9, 2021
Hour: 12:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Firing Rate Homeostasis in Neural Circuits: From basic principles to malfunctions
Prof. Inna Slutsky
Head, Dept of Physiology and Pharmacology
Sackler Faculty of Medicine,
Tel Aviv University
Maintaining average activity level within a set-point range constitutes a fundamental property of central neural circuits. Accumulated evidence suggests that firing rate distributions and their means represent physiological variables regulated by homeostatic systems. Utilizing basic concepts of control theory, we developed a theoretical and experimental framework for identifying the core members of homeostatic machinery. I will describe an integrative approach to study the relationships between ongoing spiking activity of individual neurons and neuronal populations in local microcircuits, synaptic transmission and plasticity, sleep and memory functions. I will show our new data on a state-dependent regulation of firing rate set-points, their dysregulation at the presymptomatic stage of Alzheimer’s disease, and the role of mitochondria in these processes.
Brain-wide networks underlying behavior - Insights from functional ultrasound imaging
Lecture
Tuesday, November 2, 2021
Hour: 12:30 - 13:30
Location:
Brain-wide networks underlying behavior - Insights from functional ultrasound imaging
Dr. Emilie Macé
Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Martinsried, Germany
Functional ultrasound imaging (fUS) is an emerging neuroimaging tool capable of measuring brain-wide vascular signals linked to neuronal activity with a high spatial-temporal resolution (100 µm, 10 Hz) in real-time. This technology is portable, affordable and adaptable to many species, and has already found applications in areas ranging from basic research to the clinic. Focusing on fundamental neuroscience, I will outline some of the recent technical advancements of fUS, such as the capacity to image the entire rodent brain while manipulating specific neuronal circuits with optogenetics. I will exemplify how promising this imaging technique is for shedding new light on the brain-wide circuits underlying behavior, as fUS is one of the few methods that enables imaging of activity deep in the brain of behaving mice.
Zoom link: https://weizmann.zoom.us/j/95406893197?pwd=REt5L1g3SmprMUhrK3dpUDJVeHlrZz09
Meeting ID: 954 0689 3197
Password: 750421
Nonoscillatory coding and multiscale representation of very large environments in the bat hippocampus by Tamir Eliav and There is Chemistry in Social Chemistry by Inbal Ravreby
Lecture
Tuesday, October 26, 2021
Hour: 12:30 - 13:30
Location:
Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Lecture Hall
Nonoscillatory coding and multiscale representation of very large environments in the bat hippocampus by Tamir Eliav and There is Chemistry in Social Chemistry by Inbal Ravreby
Tamir Eliav, Prof. Nachum Ulanovsky Lab and Inbal Ravreby, Prof. Noam Sobel Lab, Dept of Brain Sciences
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.
Pages
All years
, All years
There are no events to display