Space coding in hippocampo-entorhinal neuronal assemblies (SPACEBRAIN)

As a result of major worldwide efforts towards understanding the fundamental operations of the brain during the past 10-20 years, significant advances have been made at almost every level of analysis. Yet, in spite of the expansive growth of the field, our understanding of brain functions has largely remained confined within individual levels of analysis. We can detail how a spike is propagated through an axon or a dendrite, or describe what particular brain regions are recruited during a memory retrieval task, but we have achieved limited mechanistic understanding of how operations at microscopic levels lead to more complex mental functions.

What neuroscience needs in order to explain how complex mental functions originate from electrical and chemical processes in brain cells, and how they disintegrate during disease, is a comprehensive and integrated cross-level analysis of how large numbers of heterogeneous synapses and neurons in distinct brain systems interact during behaviour. The aim of the SPACEBRAIN project is to begin the search for principles of microcircuit computation in the spatial representation system of rodents, using a powerful combination of novel computational, electrophysiological, optical and molecular research tools that have never been applied before to the analysis of brain circuitry.

The project will help us understand a prototypical association cortex and develop new research tools for the wider European neuroscience community.

  • SPACEBRAIN is funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for research. It is a collaborative Small or medium-scale focused research project in the Health work programme.
2008/12/12 15:49, Haagen Waade