Fecha y Horario:

26 de marzo de 2018, 14:30hs

Orador:

Edvard Moser

Afiliación:

Nobel Prize 2014 in Medicine and Physiology

Resumen:

The ability to map space is critical to survival. Without it, we would not find food or partners, or we would be eaten by predators. Neural systems for finding one´s way thus exist in all animals. In mammals, space is mapped by complex neural networks in a pair of brain areas called the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. These brain areas contain a variety of specialized cell types, including grid cells. Grid cells are active only when animals are at certain locations, locations that tile environments in a periodic hexagonal pattern, like in a Chinese checkerboard. Grid cells keep track of our position in the environment in ways reminiscent of a GPS. I will discuss putative mechanisms of the grid pattern and show how space is mapped by grid cells as well as other specialized cells. In the last part of the talk, I will show how temporal information is encoded across scales from seconds to hours within the overall population state in a neighbouring region, the lateral entorhinal cortex. A similar encoding of time is not present in medial entorhinal cortex or hippocampal areas. When animals’ experiences are constrained to become similar across repeated task trials, the encoding of temporal flow across trials is reduced while encoding of time relative to trial start is improved. In the hippocampus, this task-dependent representation of time may be integrated with spatial inputs, allowing the hippocampus to store a unified representation of experience.

Minibio:

Edvard Moser was born and grew up in very small settlements of the islands of Norway. He was fascinated by science from a very early age, and studied psychology at the University of Oslo. He began his scientific career with the determination to explore the neural bases of cognitive processes, so he focused his PhD in physiology. During his postdoctoral studies he worked with the leading scientists of the UK analyzing the neural basis of the cognitive processes involved in spatial orientation and navigation, including John O'Keef, who had discovered the so-called ‘place cells’ in the mammalian temporal lobe. He was appointed as associate professor in psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in 1996 and was promoted to professor of neuroscience in 1998. He later became head of department of the Institute for Systems Neuroscience at NTNU, where he and May-Britt Moser have since directed the investigations that gave rise to the discovery of several types of specialized neurons encoding spatial information. He is member of the most prestigious scientific societies in the world, and has obtained more than 15 international awards for his research, including the Nobel Prize in 2014, shared with May-Britt Moser and John O'Keefe.

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