Submitted by Emily Rigby on Wed, 24/09/2025 - 15:50
Professor Mayank Mehta (UCLA, California) will give a special seminar at 11am on Wednesday 1st October 2025, in the Physiology Building's Hodgkin-Huxley seminar room.
All are welcome.
Seminar title:
Hippocampal enigmas: Memory, Alzheimer's and AI
Abstract:
After a century of fantastic progress and a Nobel Prize, the hippocampus remains enigmatic. Hippocampus is thought to be the GPS system of the brain, yet hippocampal damage causes profound non-spatial memory deficits as well. Hippocampal neurons show robust place cells in rodents but they are elusive in primates. Human hippocampal neurons represent famous movie clips whose analog in rodents is unknown. Hippocampus is one of the deepest parts of the brain's deep network. Hence, the answers to the hippocampal mysteries may lie in the dynamics of this complex network. We have attempted this using virtual reality, computational modeling and in vivo physiology. The results will help solve several challenges. Dozens of drugs have cured Alzheimer's in mice but all have failed in humans; and gigantic AIs lack the commonsense of mice.