题目：Crack the neural codes for spatial memories in dreams and neurological diseases

报告人：Daoyun Ji, Ph.D. ( 分子与细胞生物学助理教授和神经科学，分子与细胞生物学系，贝勒医学院 )

时间：2013年06月18日 星期二 14:30-15:30

地点： 金光生命科学大楼208室

联系人：张晨研究员

摘要:

The brain is remarkably efficient at recording our daily experience and events as episodic memories. The life-long accumulation of episodic memories makes us who we are and decides what we do. Although how the neurons in the brain encode and store episodic memories remains a mystery, great progress has been achieved in recent years. In this talk, I would like to introduce our works on understanding the memory codes for places and spatial trajectories, by simultaneously monitoring tens or hundreds of single neurons in freely moving rodents during spatial navigation tasks. After an overview of how spatial memories are encoded by neurons in the brain area hippocampus, I will explain why sleep is important for stabilizing new memory codes and transferring them from the hippocampus to neocortex for long-term storage. Then, the rest of the talk will focus on our recent work on a mouse model related to Alzheimer’s disease, which reveals a surprising competition between internal thoughts and external environments in establishing spatial memory codes.