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NJIT Mathematical Biology Seminar

Tuesday, September 18, 2007, 4:00pm
Cullimore Hall 611
New Jersey Institute of Technology

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Hippocampal network-level coding units for real-time representation of episodic experiences

Remus Osan

Center for BioDynamics, Boston University

To examine the network-level organizing principles by which the brain achieves its real-time encoding of episodic information, we have investigated simultaneously recorded activity patterns from of as many as 260 individual neurons in the mouse hippocampus during various startling episodes. We find that each type of episode triggered startle-specific firing changes in a subset of CA1 neurons and that statistical pattern achieve successful classification of episodic neural patterns in a low-dimensional encoding-subspace. Application of a sliding window technique further enabled us to reliably capture not only the temporal dynamics of real-time network encoding, but also post-event processing of newly formed traces. In summary, our research suggests that startling episodic events are encoded by specific sets of neural encoding units, termed neural cliques, capable of overcoming the variability of its members in order to achieve real-time encoding robustness and that these units are involved in post-event processing of the memory traces.