NEURAL CODES OF SPACE

Описание: November 2025 General Meeting
—
Edvard I. Moser - Founding Director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience Co-Director of Center for Neural Algorithms in the Cortex, Co-Director of Center for Neural Computation, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

"Neural Codes of Space"

The ability to keep track of our position in space depends on neural circuits in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. These circuits contain specialized cell types, including hippocampal place cells and entorhinal grid cells, that together form the brain’s spatial mapping system. Recent advances in large-scale recording technologies now make it possible to monitor the activity of thousands of these neurons simultaneously during behavior. Using these approaches, we show how the collective dynamics of grid cells arise across large populations. Their activity is organized on a torus-shaped manifold, indicating that the brain’s internal representation of space is inherently periodic. This periodic code is transformed in the hippocampus into countless distinct place-cell maps, providing a basis for episodic memory. Remarkably, the toroidal structure emerges early in postnatal development, before significant experience, suggesting that the neural architecture for mapping space is intrinsic and largely pre-wired.