Memory Lane

Have you ever wondered how we remember the world we live in and the experience we have in it? In this talk Nick Robinson will give a brief overview of our current understanding of the neural basis of our memories and how we navigate the world. He will then describe state of the art research making a direct link between activity in specific populations of neurons in our brains and this ability. By using lasers to both record and manipulate activity in populations of neurons in the hippocampus of the brain, we were able to bias the behaviour of mice navigating in virtual reality. Activation of neurons encoding a rewarded location was sufficient to cause the mice to act as if they were in that area, directly implicating these cells in spatial memory and navigation.

Picture a bright red apple in your mind’s eye, what can you see? If you see a clear picture, then you are probably a ‘Visualiser’, able to generate realistic pictures inside your mind. If you cannot, then you may be ‘Aphantasic’, a name given to those who cannot conjure this internal visual experience. Catriona Scrivener is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, and will talk about what happens in our brain when we construct these mental images, and how brain activity differs between ‘Visualisers’ and ‘Aphantasics’.