Space, time and memory in the brain

17:30 – 18:30 Uhr | Übergabe der Urkunden
Laudationes für die neuen Mitglieder:
Prof. Dr. Jörg Hacker ML, Präsident der Leopoldina

18:30 – 19:30 Uhr | Leopoldina-Vorlesung
Space, time and memory in the brain
Prof. Dr. May-Britt Moser ML, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Trondheim (Norway)

The hippocampus is a seahorse-shaped brain structure that is necessary for encoding memories about our daily lives. In her lecture, May-Britt Moser will show what type of information the hippocampus receives to generate such memories. Memories for episodes include information about where the event happened, when it happened, and what happened. Brain structures are feeding the hippocampus with this information – information about space, about time, and about content. There are specialized cells that signal where the animal is (place cells), which direction the animal is moving (head direction cells), cells that signal the layout of the environment (grid cells), and cells signaling the speed of the animal (speed cells). Other cells signal objects and the spatial relationship between the object and the animal. Finally, Moser will show how groups of cells are tagging events with a time signal so that similar episodes can be separated in time. Thus, the hippocampus receives the necessary information from specialized brain cells to create memories about events.

Prof. Dr. May-Britt Moser ML
May-Britt Moser is Professor of Neuroscience since 2002, Scientific Co-Director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Director of the Centre for Neural Computation at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. She is interested in the neural basis of cognitive functions. Together with her colleague, Edvard Moser, she discovered grid cells and other functional cell types in the entorhinal cortex, including head direction cells, border cells, speed cells and object-vector cells, and mechanisms for representation of episodic time – suggesting that the entorhinal cortex can function as a hub for the brain network for representation of space and episodic memory. Moser received her initial training at the University of Oslo, supervised by Dr. Per Andersen, on the structural basis of hippocampal memory. She has received numerous international awards. Together with Edvard Moser and John O’Keefe, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014.

ML – Mitglied der Leopoldina

Foto: Prof. Dr. May-Britt Moser ML (Rita Elmkvist Nilsen, Kavli Institutt, NTNU)