QBI Neuroscience Seminar: 'Neural substrates of memories and decisions'

Event Details

Date:

Wednesday, 12 July 2017 - Wednesday, 12 July 2017

Time:

4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Room:

QBI Level 7 Auditorium

UQ Location:

Queensland Brain Institute (St Lucia)

URL:

http://www.qbi.uq.edu.au/neuroscience-seminars

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Professor Loren Frank, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Physiology, University of California, San Francisco

Title: 'Neural substrates of memories and decisions'

Abstract:
The ability to use experience to guide behavior is one of the most remarkable abilities of the brain. Our goal is to understand how activity and plasticity in neural circuits underlie both learning and the ability to use learned information to make decisions. These processes engage widely distributed brain circuits, and in this talk I will describe studies that shed light on the links between specific patterns of brain activity and both memory retrieval and memory consolidation. I will focus on work we have done that identifies hippocampal sharp-wave ripple (SWR) events as a candidate substrate for these memory processes. I will first describe results linking these events to awake memory processes. I will then present an examination of patterns of cortical – hippocampal information flow around the time of sleep SWRs and discuss the implications for our understanding of memory consolidation.