Dr John O'Keefe delivers a Hebb lecture

A Special Hebb Lecture was delivered by Prof. John O’Keefe, co-winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday June 1st, at 10:00am, in MCMED 504  (McIntyre Medical Building, 3655 Promenade Sir William Osler).

Prof. O’Keefe earned both his Masters and Ph.D. degrees from McGill University in the Department of Psychology supervised by Prof. Ron. Melzack. He then moved to University College London where he is currently Director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour, and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience. He is known for his research about how space is encoded in the hippocampus;  using a  combination of behavioural and electrophysiological methods, Prof. O’Keefe discovered place cells which show a specific kind of temporal coding that enable an animal to recognize and spatially navigate its surroundings.

Professor O’Keefe is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards including the Gruber Prize and the Kavli prize in Neuroscience, and is Fellow of the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences, UK.

Main Lecture at 10:00am, MCMED 504

The hippocampus as a cognitive map: How we got here and where we are going

Abstract
Locating ourselves in familiar environments, navigating flexibly around those environments, and remembering where important objects can be found in them represent some of the most fundamental cognitive tasks that the brain performs. Remarkably there is a dedicated set of brain cells located in the hippocampal formation at the centre of a cognitive mapping network which performs these computations. In the first part of my talk, I will describe the place, direction, grid and boundary cells in the hippocampal formation which taken together comprise the cognitive map. I will emphasise the idea that a place cell can be constructed in two independent ways, one relying on current sensory information derived from the environment carried by the boundary cells and the other a path integration system which uses information from the direction and grid cells derived from the animal’s own movements. In addition to providing inputs for the construction of place representations, the grid cells appear to be good candidates to provide the distance metric for the map. In the second part of my talk, I will review recent evidence from our laboratory suggesting firstly that the grid cells are a subset of a more extensive group of spatially periodic EC cells which might also be used to construct place cells and secondly that the grid cell system might not be able to provide the metric for the cognitive map in all environments and under all circumstances.