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Integrators in short- and long-term memory
The accumulation and storage of information in memory is a fundamental computation underlying animal behavior. In many brain regions and task paradigms, ranging from motor control to navigation to decision-making, such accumulation is accomplished through neural integrator circuits that enable external inputs to move a system’s population-wide patterns of neural activity along a continuous attractor. In the first portion of the talk, I will discuss our efforts to dissect the circuit mechanisms underlying a neural integrator from a rich array of anatomical, physiological, and perturbation experiments. In the second portion of the talk, I will show how the accumulation and storage of information in long-term memory may also be described by attractor dynamics, but now within the space of synaptic weights rather than neural activity. Altogether, this work suggests a conceptual unification of seemingly distinct short- and long-term memory processes.
Virus-like intercellular communication in the nervous system
The neuronal gene Arc is essential for long-lasting information storage in the mammalian brain and mediates various forms of synaptic plasticity. We recently discovered that Arc self-assembles into virus-like capsids that encapsulate RNA. Endogenous Arc protein is released from neurons in extracellular vesicles that mediate the transfer of Arc mRNA into new target cells. Evolutionary analysis indicates that Arc is derived from a vertebrate lineage of Ty3/gypsy retrotransposons, which are also ancestral to retroviruses such as HIV. These findings suggest that Gag retroelements have been repurposed during evolution to mediate intercellular communication in the nervous system that may underlie cognition and memory.