Brain Awareness Week (BAW) is the global campaign to increase public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research.

Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience (CBM) host, and participate, in several events during BAW.

Exhibition

On 12 March 2010, the Museum of Natural History and Archaeology opened a large exhibition to celebrate the 250 year anniversary for the establishment of the Royal Norwegian Society of Science and Letters and the 100 year anniversary for the establishment of the Norwegian Institute of Technology.

Cartoon and game

At the part called Knowledge Alarm you will find both a cartoon and a game called a-MAZE-ing race based on the research performed at CBM.

Annual Kavli Lecture

Mark Bear: A cure for fragile x? -Fulfilling the promise of molecular medicine in a developmental brain disorder

18 March at 18:00 In the Student Society building

The lecture is free

Over four decades of research on visual cortex have culminated in a deep understanding of the mechanisms responsible for whittling away inappropriate synaptic connections.

Insights derived from this line of research have recently suggested the remarkable possibility of new treatments—and possibly a cure—for fragile X syndrome7, the most common inherited form of human mental retardation and autism.

Memory day 21 March

At Museum of Natural History and Archaeology. Activities and lectures for young and old

Lectures by associate professor Robert Biegler:

13.00 ”How and why memory goes wrong and why it is amazingly good anyway”

14.00 ”How to learn efficiently”

Annual Kavli Lecture 2010:

Mark Bear: A cure for fragile x?

-Fulfilling the promise of molecular medicine in a developmental brain disorder

18 March at 18:00

In the Student Society building

The lecture is free

Proper brain function requires the sculpting of connections between neurons during early postnatal life. Synapses are formed and strengthened, weakened and lost, under the influence of sensory experience.

Over four decades of research on visual cortex have culminated in a deep understanding of the mechanisms responsible for whittling away inappropriate synaptic connections.

Insights derived from this line of research have recently suggested the remarkable possibility of new treatments—and possibly a cure—for fragile X syndrome, the most common inherited form of human mental retardation and autism.

Dr. Bear is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and is the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Questions regarding the event? Contact Hege J Tunstad

What goes on in the brain during musical improvisation? Are there differences in brain activity when a musician plays written music compared to improvising? Does improvisation have something in common with “the adaptive unconscious”?

Using an old bass and a baritone sax, Bjørn Alterhaug and John Pål Inderberg will illustrate their talk with music, and will discuss improvisation as a phenomenon and its potential in different contexts.

Time: Friday 12 February, at 2:30 pm

Place: Seminar room, MTFS 3.floor

Mayank Mehta will give a seminar on the topic

“Space, Phase and Networks”

on Friday 18 Dec at 1.00 pm in the conference room, 3rd floor, CBM.

Mayank Mehta is a visiting member of the Kavli Institute and an Associate Professor at the Departments Physics and Astronomy, and Neurology at UCLA, Los Angeles.

Press release:

19 November the article Frequency of gamma oscillations routes flow of information in the hippocampus is published in Nature.

The human brain is bombarded with all kinds of information, from the memory of last night’s delicious dinner to the instructions from your boss at your morning meeting. But how do you “tune in” to just one thought or idea and ignore all the rest of what is going on around you, until it comes time to think of something else? Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for the Biology of Memory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have discovered a mechanism that the brain uses to filter out distracting thoughts to focus on a single bit of information. Their results are reported in the current issue of Nature.

Think of your brain like a radio: You’re turning the knob to find your favourite station, but the knob jams, and you’re stuck listening to something that’s in between stations. It’s a frustrating combination that makes it quite hard to get an update on swine flu while a Michael Jackson song wavers in and out. Staying on the right frequency is the only way to really hear what you’re after.

In much the same way, the brain’s nerve cells are able to “tune in” to the right station to get exactly the information they need, says researcher Laura Colgin, who was the paper’s first author. “Just like radio stations play songs and news on different frequencies, the brain uses different frequencies of waves to send different kinds of information,” she says.

Gamma waves as information carriers

Colgin and her colleagues measured brain waves in rats, in three different parts of the hippocampus, which is a key memory center in the brain. While listening in on the rat brain wave transmissions, the researchers started to realize that there might be something more to a specific sub-set of brain waves, called gamma waves. Researchers have thought these waves are linked to the formation of consciousness, but no one really knew why their frequency differed so much from one region to another and from one moment to the next. Information is carried on top of gamma waves, just like songs are carried by radio waves. These “carrier waves” transmit information from one brain region to another. “We found that there are slow gamma waves and fast gamma waves coming from different brain areas, just like radio stations transmit on different frequencies,” she says.

You really can “be on the same wavelength”

“You know how when you feel like you really connect with someone, you say you are on the same wavelength? When brain cells want to connect with each other, they synchronize their activity,” Colgin explains.

“The cells literally tune into each other’s wavelength. We investigated how gamma waves in particular were involved in communication across cell groups in the hippocampus. What we found could be described as a radio-like system inside the brain. The lower frequencies are used to transmit memories of past experiences, and the higher frequencies are used to convey what is happening where you are right now.”

If you think of the example of the jammed radio, the way to hear what you want out of the messy signals would be to listen really hard for the latest news while trying to filter out the unwanted music. The hippocampus does this more efficiently. It simply tunes in to the right frequency to get the station it wants. As the cells tune into the station they’re after, they are actually able to filter out the other station at the same time, because its signal is being transmitted on a different frequency.

The switch

“The cells can rapidly switch their activity to tune in to the slow waves or the fast waves”, Colgin says, “but it seems as though they cannot listen to both at the exact same time. This is like when you are listening to your radio and you tune in to a frequency that is midway between two stations- you can't understand anything- it's just noise.” In this way, the brain cells can distinguish between an internal world of memories and a person’s current experiences. If the messages were carried on the same frequency, our perceptions of the world might be completely confused. “Your current perceptions of a place would get mixed up with your memories of how the place used to be,” Colgin says.

The cells that tune into different wavelengths work like a switch, or rather, like zapping between radio stations that are already programmed into your radio. The cells can switch back and forth between different channels several times per second. The switch allows the cells to attend to one piece at a time, sorting out what’s on your mind from what’s happening and where you are at any point in time. The researchers believe this is an underlying principle for how information is handled throughout the brain.

“This switch mechanism points to superfast routing as a general mode of information handling in the brain,” says Edvard Moser, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience director. “The classical view has been that signaling inside the brain is hardwired, subject to changes caused by modification of connections between neurons. Our results suggest that the brain is a lot more flexible. Among the thousands of inputs to a given brain cell, the cell can choose to listen to some and ignore the rest and the selection of inputs is changing all the time. We believe that the gamma switch is a general principle of the brain, employed throughout the brain to enhance interregional communication.”

Can a switch malfunction explain schizophrenia?

People who are schizophrenic have problems keeping these brain signals straight. They cannot tell, for example, if they are listening to voices from people who are present or if the voices are from the memory of a movie they have seen. “We cannot tell for sure if it is this switch that is malfunctioning, but we do know that gamma waves are abnormal in schizophrenic patients,” Colgin says. “Schizophrenics' perceptions of the world around them are mixed up, like a radio stuck between stations.”

Rhodes, Greece; 19th-20th September 2009
9 students and postdocs from 4 European countries, collaborating under the European Commission Framework 7 funded SpaceBrain grant, gathered together under the Greek sun at the Rhodos Palace Hotel for a weekend of talks and discussion. The meeting was held to coincide with the end of the 41st European Brain and Behaviour Society meeting, also held in Rhodes. The aim of the meeting was to allow students and postdocs to communicate freely in a relaxed environment, to share ideas and help each other tackle challenges faced by the demanding projects of the SpaceBrain grant.

Norwegian article

Through the power of Google Earth, you can travel the globe from the comfort of your computer screen, peering down on everything from above. But once you change your perspective – if you go into one of the buildings that you’ve looked down on – you have to upload a new map. Now, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have discovered that the brain also creates multiple independent maps while finding the way in the physical world.

Four years ago, researchers at NTNU’s Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience were the first to discover the intricacies of how the brain creates internal maps using so-called grid cells in a coordinate system. Now postdoc Dori Derdikman and his colleagues from the same research team have uncovered a whole new aspect of how the brain's mapping system works. Instead of just one big map, the brain makes a whole series of

maps, some very fine grained, and some more rough – along with an advanced sorting system.

One map or many?

“We long wondered if all of the brain’s mapping information was stored in a single map” Derdikman says. “So we figured out a way to check this.”

In a new study, published in Nature Neuroscience, the researchers measured the brain activity of laboratory rats allowed to roam freely in a small compartment. The measurements created a map that corresponded to how the rat’s grid cells mapped out the area. Once the researchers had a clear understanding of what the rat’s mental map looked like, they changed the layout of the compartment. Instead of an open area, the rats were now confronted with a labyrinth of long, narrow corridors in a hairpin maze – created by the insertion of walls in the compartment.

“When the walls were inserted, something happened with the rats’ maps” Derdikman explained. “First we recorded the same map. But when the rats came around a hairpin turn in the maze, the map changed totally. It happened several times, each time in connection with when the rats went around a wall and came into a new corridor.” If the rat had been using the same map that it had created for the open compartment, the map would have remained unchanged, he said.

Confusion or geography

Derdikman also checked to see if it was confusing for the rats to change direction all the time because of the maze walls, and whether that could be the reason why the maps were restarted for each new corridor. Rats were trained to run the same route formed by the hairpin maze, but in a compartment without partitions. In this case, the rat used the same map as when it ran freely in the open compartment. That means that it is the physical environment that triggers the creation of a new map, not the rat’s learned behaviour.

Border cells are key

How is it that so many different maps are linked to the surrounding walls? A recently discovered cell type, border cells, which are active along certain walls in a given environment, may shed light on this question. Border cells describe the limits of how an environmental ends and another begins.

“Maybe these border cells are what signal the brain that to switch maps when you move over a border in your environment”, says Derdikman’s colleague at the Kavli Institute, Trygve Solstad, who was lead author of a 2008 article in Science magazine that reported the presence of the cells. “We think that there is this kind of environmental change when the rat enters a new corridor in the hairpin maze.”

But the definitive answer to the question will have to wait until a research project examines how border cells behave in a fragmented environment.

The two-day symposium on human medial temporal lobe and memory at Øya Helsehus in Trondheim, was a success, concludes Director of Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Edvard Moser. - Some of the worlds true experts in the field have shown us how rodent studies can be used to explain human memory functions.

The symposium began with a public lecture by Hanne Lehn as part of the defense of her thesis entitled “Memory functions of the human medial temporal lobe studied with fMRI”

Then Professor Dr. Chantal E. Stern (Boston Univ, Ctr Memory & Brain, Boston, USA) gave her speech on fMRI studies of sequence encoding and retrieval

This was followed by the lecture of Professor Dr. Craig E. L. Stark, (Univ CA, Irvine, USA) Pattern Separation in the Aging Hippocampus.

And Professor Dr. Michael E. Hasselmo's (Boston Univ, Ctr Memory & Brain, Boston, USA) Mechanisms for episodic memory in the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus.

Finally, Hanne Lehn defended her thesis Memory functions of the human medial temporal lobe studied with fMRI

Trygve Solstad defended his thesis Neural representations of Euclidean space on 4 September.

The thesis provides five novel contributions to the field of spatial cognition:

1. The entire hippocampus is involved in spatial processing.

2. The entire medial entorhinal cortex is involved in spatial processing.

3. Spatial maps are represented at increasing spatial scales from dorsal to ventral in both structures.

4. This topography in spatial scale readily lends itself to a simple grid-cell to place-cell transform.

5. The medial entorhinal cortex contains a representation of geometric borders.

It was previously thought that the ventral hippocampus was uniquely involved in emotional and motivational behavior because animals can still solve spatial problems with damage to this area. The demonstration of ventral hippocampal place cells with place fields extending for several meters indicates that the area is important for navigation on a larger scale than has been tested until now. It also suggests that context-related fear may arise from association of emotional input from upstream structures like the amygdale, with ventral hippocampal place cells that have place fields covering the entire environment.

Having multiple maps at different spatial scales available at the same time may be beneficial when planning a route, e.g. when walking home from work. One can make a quick route based on a large-scale map and start walking in the right direction immediately, putting off small-scale navigational problems, like taking the slightly longer or slightly more crowded street, until the decision point.

Representing borders and obstacles in ones environment is also essential to calculate an efficient route. Border cells in the MEC are perfectly situated to provide such information. Having identified most spatial units needed to navigate,how route planning is actually performed on the spatial maps in the hippocampus and MEC is now a tangible problem to approach by a combination of experimental and theoretical techniques.

Developing a mathematical model for how place cells can read grid-cell “coordinates”, we showed that the hierarchical organization of spatial maps provides a first clue to how this computation is performed, but finding the navigational algorithm that connects the identified functional cell types with behavior remains a paramount challenge.

The committe:

1.opponent: John O'Keefe

2.opponent: Boleslaw Srebro

3.opponent: Laura Colgin

Hanne Lehn defended her PhD thesis Memory functions of the human medial temporal lobe studied with fMRI on 28 August.

Hanne has used fMRI to characterize functional differences between the hippocampus and the parahippocampal structures during memory retrieval.

- I have looked into how we retrieve associations of different kinds, Lehn says. - For example associations over time, and associations across sensory modalities. I have found that recalling a temporal sequence of events depends in particular on the hippocampus, and that retrieval of crossmodal associations involves the perirhinal cortex.

The work has been performed at the MR Centre at NTNU

Lehn recently published A specific role of the human hippocampus in recall of temporal sequences in The Journal of Neuroscience

Can you still remember the Svalbard conference?

The experience may have resulted in several newborn brain cells in your Hippocampus.

Here is more on newborn brain cells, in the words of Gage,Treves and O'Keefe, at Schrödingers Katt on 12 March.

Solstad et.al reports in this weeks issue of Science a new cell type found in entorhinal cortex. The cell, termed border cell, responds to edges, borders and obstacles.

Norwegian articles on border cells at nrk.no, forskning.no and dagbladet.no

Comment on Nature news

At least three cell types are thought to encode an animal's position in the environment: place cells, whose activity indicates a particular location in space, head direction cells, which fire only when the animal is facing a certain direction, and grid cells, whose firing fields form a regular pattern across the environment. However, computational models suggested the existence of at least one more cell type called “boundary vector cells” whose activity patterns encode an animal's distance, in a certain direction, from a salient geometrical border. Now Solstad et al. provide experimental evidence for a cell type in the spatial representation circuit of the medial entorhinal cortex, termed the border cell, that fits the bill. Border cells have firing fields that line up along selected geometric boundaries of the proximal environment, irrespective of boundary length or continuity with other boundaries. Collectively, border cells may thus perhaps define the perimeter of the environment and thereby serve as a reference frame for places inside it, controlling the activity of the other position-sensing cell types in that environment.(Science editorial highlights)

Dr. Helen Pothuizen, Cardiff University, UK, will give a seminar on

Identifying the roles of the granular and dysgranular retrosplenial cortices in spatial memory

Time: Thursday 18 December, 3 pm.

Place: Meeting room, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, MTFS

Alessandro Treves, SISSA - Cognitive Neuroscience, Trieste, Italy, will give an informal seminar with the title;

Keeping within the beaten track: a non-intelligent model of place field formation

Date: Tuesday 2 December.

Time: 2 pm

Place: Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience; Meeting room

The Norwegian Broadcasting Company, NRK, is highlighting memory in their Science Show Schödingers Katt' this month, featuring among others professors Edvard and May-Britt Moser in the tv-specials called MEMO.

Videos from the 2008 Svalbard Conference are available here and here. Lots more on NRKs MEMO online

Kavli Institute/ERC research fellow Ayumu Tashiro has won the Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award in Neuroscience. The Foundation's Young Scientist Awards, selected in partnership with preeminent science organizations, aim to recognize brilliant early career scientists from around the world.

The prize was awarded at Neuroscience 2008, and Tashiro shares the prize with Reza Sharif-Naeini form Institut de Pharmacologie Moleculaire et Cellulaire, Valbonne, France.

The award includes $25,000 to each recipient.

'Solving the big mysteries of the brain requires the effort of many, often working alone at night, all over the globe. This award recognizes the international cooperation required to harness knowledge that spans continents', said Eve Marder, PhD, president of Society for Neuroscience, SfN.

' This is a great honor', director Edvard Moser at Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience says. 'This award emphasizes the international cooperative aspect of research, which we deeply believe is a prerequisite for scientific success.'

Edvard Moser has been invited to contract negotiations with the ERC for his project 'Neural circuits for space representation in the mammalian cortex'. This is one out of 9 successful neuroscience projects to be funded after the ERC's first call for Advanced Grant proposals in Life Sciences

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15 PhD students and post-docs from 8 European research groups participating in the SpaceBrain grant met in La Ciotat, near Marseille in France, to share their latest results and plan futureprojects. The aim of the SpaceBrain Junior meeting was to generate discussion about the ideas, hopes and fears of the junior scientists (the workforce behind the SpaceBrain grant) in a relaxed and informal environment.

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Professors Edvard and May-Britt Moser receive the 2008 Fernstrom Award for their ‘groundbreaking research on the mechanisms of the brain that determine our spatial position’.

The Moser research group has shown that our inner maps are made In a part of the brain called entorhinal cortex.

The professors share the prize of 1 Million Swedish kronors.

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'It was like a week of red carpet events. We've all felt like stars.' Last week turned out to be a huge success in many ways, director Edvard Moser at Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, tells. 'The Kavli price ceremony in Oslo was a worthy tribute to some of the greatest researchers in this field, and the lectures were all presenting important pieces of neuroscience research and discoveries.'

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