Media

Our brains construct mental maps of the environment from the experiences of our senses. This allows us to orient ourselves, remember where something happened, and plan where we go next. In our new publication in Nature Communications, we developed a new computer model that can finely watch the brain as it orients in space and remembers things. We show that newly formed memories affect how we perceive the world around us: the more familiar our environment is, the fewer information need to be integrated. This is directly reflected in our brain activity, and can now be measured!

Read More

In order to orient ourselves in space, and to find our way around, we form mental maps of our surroundings. But what happens if the coordinate system of our brain, which measures our mental maps, is distorted? In our new paper in Nature Human Behaviour we show that under these circumstances there are also distortions in our spatial memory.

Read More

Often we remember very well the chronology of events. We can tell which event occurred first and how much time passed between two events. Apparently, memories of events in the brain are linked when they occurred close together. The entorhinal cortex seems to play an important role as the medial part of the temporal lobe.Using an experiment that combines learning in virtual reality and fMRI, our new paper – now out in eLife – describes how a temporal map of memories is created in the entorhinal cortex.

Read More

NaturePodcast made a great video on the use of “human lab rats” and virtual reality in neuroscience. Among two other neuroscience labs our VR lab at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience was also visited and is presented by Tobias Navarro Schroeder:
Read More

It is one of the most fundamental questions in neuroscience: How do humans think? In our latest paper, now out in Science, Jacob Bellmund and Christian Doeller teamed up with Peter Gärdenfors, cognitive scientist at Lund University, and Edvard Moser, physiologist at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, to offer a new proposal—Humans think using their brain’s navigation system.
Read More

Our new study is out in Current Biology. Staudigl et al. show grid-like modulation of human high frequency activity in non-invasive magnetoencephalographic and intracranial EEG recordings. The results indicate that the human entorhinal cortex codes visual space in a grid-like manner, supporting the view that grid-coding generalizes beyond environmental mapping during locomotion.

Read More

The entorhinal cortex is a crucial part of the brain’s navigation system but its function beyond navigation remains unclear. In our new study published in Nature Neuroscience, we examined entorhinal fMRI activity in a highly controlled viewing paradigm and show that the same mechanisms used to represent where we are, also represent where we look.

Read More

We constantly move our eyes to sample visual information. In order to make the sampling efficient, these eye movements need to be coordinated with the intrinsic brain dynamics that constrain visual computations. Using intracranial EEG and MEG recordings, our new paper in PLOS Biology shows that eye movements are locked to the phase of alpha oscillations, and that this coordination supports mnemonic encoding of visual scenes.

Read More