Abstract:
Animals depend on the ability to navigate in space. Humans think not only about physical space but also about abstract spaces that allow us to geometrize complex problems. Inside our heads, the brain represents space as a pattern of neural firing, produced and maintained by circuits in the hippocampal formation. In this talk, I will describe progress towards a theory of organization of the circuits and systems that build the brain’s internal description of space. I will focus on self-organization of “grid cells” which use path-integration to build an efficient, modular code for location; on error-correction of this code via interaction with “border cells”; and on the simultaneous representation of place and context by “place cells”. I will compare the predictions of theory to experimental data, and discuss how the brain self-organizes to produce a cognitive map: a way of imagining location in physical and abstract spaces.