“The neuroscience questions we had at the time in my lab were way too advanced for the statistical knowledge we had. From the beginning stages of the project, he enlisted the participation of statisticians in the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences. Right now, it’s being represented, but we can see how that changes very quickly.”įortin knew early on that the readings of hippocampal activity would result in enormous quantities of raw data. “You’re not stuck on that memory for long. “When you’re thinking about something, it moves quickly,” he says. Fortin says that he and his colleagues were, in some ways, able to “read the minds” of their subjects by viewing the “coding” of the cells-which ones were firing and which were not-in rapid succession. Obtained in millisecond intervals over several minutes, neuronal activity and inactivity measurements present a dynamic picture of the brain’s functioning. When we record activity patterns in a structure, it’s like we’re seeing zeros and ones in a computer.” That provides us with some insight into how the brain represents and computes information. “If I were to stick electrodes in your brain-we can’t that’s why we use rats-I could see which cells are firing and which ones are not firing at any given moment. “The analogy I would think about is computing,” Fortin says. By presenting five different smells in various sequences, the scientists were able to measure the animals’ memory of the correct sequence and detect how their brains captured these sequential relationships.
THEBRAIN ORGANIZE THOUGHTS SERIES
The researchers monitored the firing of neurons in rats’ brains as they underwent a series of odor identification tests. The project, which took more than three years to complete, involved experimental and data analysis phases.
“Where it connects with everybody is that this type of memory is strongly impaired in a variety of neurological disorders or simply with aging, so we really need to know how this brain function works.” This ability helps us function in our daily life, but before this study, we didn’t have a clear idea of the neuronal mechanisms behind these processes,” says corresponding author Norbert Fortin, associate professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California, Irvine. “Our brain keeps a pretty good record of when specific experiences or events occur. The finding may be a critical early step toward understanding memory failures in cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.Ĭombining electrophysiological recording techniques in rodents with a statistical machine learning analysis of huge troves of data, the researchers uncovered evidence suggesting that the hippocampal network encodes and preserves progressions of experiences to aid in decision-making. The new study details the discovery of the fundamental mechanisms by which the hippocampus region of the brain organizes memories into sequences and how this can be used to plan future behavior. Researchers have uncovered the key brain mechanisms for organizing memories in time. University University of California, Irvine
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