On Tuesday, 10 October, at 3 p.m., a guest lecture by Dr Avital Hahamy from the Welcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at University College London will be held
The title of the lecture: "Reactivation in the human brain connects the past with the present".
On the content of the lecture:
In this talk, I will propose our brains achieve this through a process called “replay”. Originally observed in rodents during navigation tasks, replay involves the rapid reactivation of cell firing patterns related to previous locations as if binding these locations into an internal model of the environment. I hypothesized that replay could similarly bind episodic events into an internal model of evolving experience. This hypothesis cannot be studied in experiments based on repeated trials, typical of rodent studies, as the neural representations of repeated events are virtually indistinguishable. However, in evolving experiences, like narratives, each event has a unique representation that can be studied in humans. In my talk, I will present a novel fMRI method, which I have developed to probe the replay of past events in the brains of participants engaged in narratives. I will demonstrate how this method uncovered that, at the boundaries between events, a network of brain regions reactivates representations of past events that are relevant to each narrative stage. These findings dramatically expand the scope of replay, suggesting that it acts as an online sense-making mechanism that interprets incoming information in light of past experience.
The lecture will be hosted on the Zoom platform. Link to registration: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wJp_kz_DTCKF2V5HGjCjbg
