Topic: cell assemblies

Assessing how brain activity generalizes across individuals is a central challenge in experimental neuroscience. Traditional task- or stimulus-driven approaches align data through trial averaging and anatomical registration, but these methods fail for spontaneous activity, where no shared temporal reference exists. In this talk, I will introduce a statistical framework, called latent-aligned Restricted Boltzmann Machines, to build a common representational space from whole-brain recordings of spontaneous activity in multiple zebrafish larvae. This shared latent space, composed of spatially loc

My talk will consist of three subtopics. The brain remembers episodes not in isolation but with their contextual relationships, such as spatial or temporal proximity. This is an essential feature of the brain’s memory, but the underlying mechanism is yet to be explored. Cell assemblies, or engrams, may provide neural representations for such relationships. First, I will show a class of associative memory models that encode and retrieve multiple memory contents linked by an arbitrary graph structure through experience and demonstrate the crucial role of the balance between two inhibitory subnet

Prior neuroimaging studies have shown that words associated with actions, like "grasp" and "kick," activate specific regions in the cortical motor system corresponding to the body parts involved in those actions. This activation follows the somatotopic mapping of these body parts. The variation in activation could suggest differences in how different types of symbols are processed semantically, or it might be a byproduct of activities related to imagining scenes associated with the meanings of these symbols. To address this debate, we simulated the semantic learning of realistic action words i

The brain continuously encodes new information as memories. At the synaptic level, memory formation is enabled by adjusting connections between activated excitatory neurons in the cortex, with mirroring inhibitory activity ensuring stable storage. Particularly, synaptic plasticity occurs as memory reactivation takes place during sleep, contributing to increased memory stability. However, the mechanism by which reactivation mediates plasticity to balance network currents for stable memory storage remains unclear. Here, we investigated whether a newly proposed form of codependent plasticity coul