Although neuroscience has provided a great deal of information about how neurons work, the fundamental question of how neurons function together in a network to produce cognition has been difficult to address. Our BRAIN team, consisting of four collaborating laboratories at NYU, Columbia and Stanford, aims to make the first attempt to fully understand a cognitively important event, called memory replay, in terms of the detailed properties of the brain cells involved. We use cutting-edge largescale recording technologies to study and manipulate identified brain cell types in behaving animals, and we will construct the first full-scale computational of model of the brain area that produces the memory replay in which every cell is explicitly simulated. These powerful new approaches are likely to yield major insights into the principles by which the interactions of neurons give rise to cognitive function, with important implications for memory disorders.

Learning Objectives:

1. Define hippocampal ripple-related memory replay

2. Identify novel large-scale recording and modeling techniques used to study the cells and circuits generating ripples

3. Discuss advances in our understanding of the mechanisms and routing of ripple content