Page 21 - Rappaport Institute Magazine 2024

BRAIN SCIENCE
18-19
Laboratory for spatial and temporal perception and memory
We research the internal spatial memory system in the brain. We work on the hippocampus regions and look into their function in navigation and episodic memory. How do cells, such as place cells, head-direction cells and grid cells form a network for computing our internal cognitive map? Our work is aimed at understanding the brain’s nerve cell circuitry, and how information from the world can be transformed into an internal map. How is information coded in these regions? How does this brain region interact with other regions? We use cutting-edge brain-recording technologies to probe the brain’s circuitry in awake behaving mice during navigation. We further check the interaction with the brain’s social oxytocin and dopamine systems, and with the brain’s dopamine system. We are further interested in understanding the brain’s malfunction in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and the change in brain states during sleep and anesthesia.
Selected Publications
ˆ Active experience, not time, determines within-day representational drift in dorsal CA1 D Khatib, A Ratzon, M Sellevoll, O Barak, G Morris, D Derdikman
Neuron, 2023
(paper appeared on cover of journal)
ˆ The chicken and egg problem of grid cells and place cells
G Morris, D Derdikman
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2023
ˆ Hippocampal sub-networks exhibit distinct spatial representation deficits in Alzheimer’s disease model mice
O Rechnitz, I Slutsky, G Morris, D Derdikman
Current Biology (2021) ,31 (15), 3292-3302. e6
ˆ Gofman, Xenia, Gilad Tocker, Shahaf Weiss, Charlotte N. Boccara, Li Lu, May-Britt Moser, Edvard I. Moser, Genela Morris, and Dori Derdikman. “Dissociation between postrhinal cortex and downstream parahippocampal regions in the representation of egocentric boundaries.” Current Biology 29, no. 16 (2019): 2751-2757
Grants and Awards
ERC SyG, ISF, ISF Bikura, GIF, NIMH-BSF
Collaborators
Vijay Balasubramanian (UPenn, Philadelphia, USA) Charlotte Boccara (Oslo, Norway)
Valery Grinevich (Manheim, Germany)
Angela Sirigu (Lyon/Marseilles, France)
derdik@technion.ac.il
Dori Derdikman Lab
Dori Derdikman, PhD Associate Professor of Neuroscience
PhD, 2006 – Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Representational drift in the hippocampus, which is the process of change that place cells in the hippocampus undergo over time has long been thought to be a process dependent on time.
In a clever experiment, published in Neuron, Dorgham Khatib and colleagues from the lab have shown that actually the cells drift as a function of experience and not time. This has implications to our understanding of treatment of trauma.