Recently reviewing speeches and talks on TED.com I found one
that hit an area of interest of mine. When completing my undergrad I had a
minor in Psychology and one of my interests was neuroscience. As an analytical
individual, understanding how the mind works and what makes us have those
patterns was fascinating to me! In regards to my blog the affect music
perception has on neuro-responses and how our mind processes these sounds in
our brain could be a great topic for study or TED talks.
Neil Burgees spoke on the way our mind and memory works
through signals in the hippocampus. Neil is deputy director of the Institute of
Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. One of the topics he
covers is how locations are used, stored, and remembered in the brain. Neil
talks about spatial recognition and how to interpret these details. There is a
slide with Homer Simpson lost in a parking lot trying to find his car. Neil
points out the distances to walls from the center of the lot where “our” car is
parked. We notice these distances to know the spatial recognition of locating
the car. One way the brain processes this information is through the
hippocampus. The role of the hippocampus in spatial navigation and episodic
memory is determined by signals that bounce from end to end, leaving messages
on specific areas. Neil gave some processes with mice, where they studied the
behavior based on how they maneuvered in patterns while tracking signals fired
during memory responses. The process with the mouse is done through
computational modeling and electrophysiological analysis of the function of
hippocampal neurons and the rat. Functional imaging of human navigation was
also compared to the rat’s behavior based on distance. It was displayed similar
to a video game, marking territory and spatial recognition. Check it out on
TED.com!
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