The Neuroscience of Time and Memory

Our memories define who we are. How memories are represented in the brain has been of long-standing interest to the scientific community. Recently, this interest has intensified as several labs have taken advantage of sophisticated new tools to make important inroads into finding and manipulating neuronal components of a single engram, or memory trace, in rodents. However, important questions remain. Episodic memories (i.e., memories for events) include the "what," "where," and "when" of an experience, yet the "when" component has largely been neglected. This session addresses this important gap with new data on the neurobiological basis of memory that include this overlooked temporal dimension. The first speaker will discuss time cells in the hippocampus, neurons that fire at specific moments in a temporally structured experience. This work shows that time is encoded distinctly from space, and that time cell sequences represent specific memories. The second speaker discovered how temporally-related events are encoded in hippocampal engrams, and will discuss the neural mechanisms that integrate memories across time. The third speaker recently discovered the neural rules for separating emotional memories across the temporal context in the amygdala, and will discuss how this process may go awry with psychiatric conditions. This session brings together leaders in the field of memory research, approaching the expansive question of the temporal component of memory using unique tools.