CNLM Colloquium UCI Spotlight Series

Join the CNLM in a hybrid colloquium featuring Dr. Laura Ewell, Assistant Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology at UC Irvine.

Sparse to dense networks: pattern separation and completion in health and epilepsy

The attractor theory of memory posits that CA3, the recurrent network at the core of the hippocampus, is capable of learning, storing, and recalling ensembles of neurons that represent experience. In healthy conditions there are constraints on the CA3 network that ensure that individual neural patterns comprise a small group of neurons that do not overlap with other patterns. One critical constraint called pattern separation works at the network level – and is thought to be performed by the dentate gyrus. In this talk, I will be examining the network processes of pattern separation and pattern completion through the lens of temporal lobe epilepsy – a disease in which network codes shift from sparse to dense schemes. We will discuss single unit data from freely moving rodents (epilepsy models and healthy animals) and new tasks being developed by my laboratory to study these critical memory processes.

This event will be held in-person in the Herklotz Conference Center and virtually via Zoom.