ICLM Journal Club
This Week - 1 November 2019 (9:30 a.m., Gonda 2nd Floor Conference Room)
Speaker: Krishna Choudhary
Title: “Solo spikes in the sleeping brain help consolidate memories”
Abstract: Memories get consolidated into long term storage through a dialogue between the hippocampus and the neocortex; most of this dialogue happens during sleep. It is thought that ripple events, where ensembles of hippocampal neurons that were active during experience synchronously fire in subsequent sleep, play a crucial role in propagating memories to the cortex during slow wave sleep. Slow wave sleep consists of alternating epochs of loosely termed "up" states, characterized by neural activity, and "down" states, characterized by relative inactivity. Hippocampal- cortical dialogue is thought to occur during the active "up" states, while "down" states are believed to represent intermittent periods of rest, where the network can recover from synaptic fatigue. A new paper by Todorova and Zugaro in Science challenges this view and demonstrates that a small number of spikes are fired during the "down" states, and that these spikes, termed "delta spikes" by the authors, play a crucial role in memory consolidation. Specifically, the authors show that cortical cells involved in learning a spatial task subsequently form cell assemblies during the "down" states in response to hippocampal ripples. They conclude that the "down" states represent isolated cortical computations that are tightly related to ongoing information processing, and play a crucial role in memory consolidation. I will review this paper and related papers, and will present some results from our lab involving computational modeling of cortical circuits during slow wave sleep that could give insight into the origin of these "delta" spikes and how it relates to hippocampal-cortical dialogue.
Relevant Paper(s): https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/377.abstract
About Us
Introduction
The Integrative Center for Learning and Memory (ICLM) is a multidisciplinary center of UCLA labs devoted to understanding the neural basis of learning and memory and its disorders. This will require a unified approach across different levels of analysis, including;
1. Elucidating the molecular cellular and systems mechanisms that allow neurons and synapses to undergo the long-term changes that ultimately correspond to 'neural memories'.
2. Understanding how functional dynamics and computations emerge from complex circuits of neurons, and how plasticity governs these processes.
3. Describing the neural systems in which different forms of learning and memory take place, and how these systems interact to ultimately generate behavior and cognition.
History of ICLM
The Integrative Center for Learning and Memory formally LMP started in its current form in 1998, and has served as a platform for many interactions and collaborations within UCLA. A key event organized by the group is the weekly ICLM Journal Club. For more than 10 years, graduate students, postdocs, principal investigators, and invited speakers have presented on topics ranging from the molecular mechanisms of synaptic plasticity, through computational models of learning, to behavior and cognition. Dean Buonomano oversees the ICLM journal club with help of student/post doctoral organizers. For other events organized by ICLM go to http://www.iclm.ucla.edu/Events.html.
Current Organizers:
Current Faculty Advisor:
Past Organizers:
i) Anna Matynia(Aug 2004 - Jun 2008) (Silva Lab)
ii) Robert Brown (Aug 2008 - Jun 2009) (Balleine Lab)
iii) Balaji Jayaprakash (Aug 2008 - Nov 2011) (Silva Lab)
iv) Justin Shobe & Thomas Rogerson (Dec 2011 - June 2013) (Silva Lab)
v) Walt Babiec (O'Dell Lab) (2013-2014)
vi) Walt Babiec (O'Dell Lab) & Helen Motanis (Buonomano Lab) (2014-2017)
vii) Helen Motanis (Buonomano Lab) & Shonali Dhingra (Mehta Lab) (2017-2018)
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