(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-05)
Ben-Yishai, Tal
Memory is our ability to encode, store, retrain, and subsequently recall information and
past experiences. Different areas of the brain are responsible for different aspects of memory,
including the hippocampus which enables us to form, organize, and store new memories.
Numerous research studies show that the hippocampal subfields are affected by memory related
diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease and Schizophrenia in different ways. Understanding what
the different hippocampal subfields do is important for basic science, but also for understanding
neurodegenerative disorders which are associated with structural and functional abnormalities of
hippocampal neurons. In order to examine the effects of memory success and failure of the
firing patterns of the hippocampal neurons in the different subfields, I used a unique dataset,
published by Faraut et al (2018), of a large sample of intracranial neural spiking data from
humans.) and ran a hierarchical clustering algorithm on the neural firing patterns. Results
suggest that the neurons in the different hippocampus subfields (CA1, CA2, CA3, and DG) have
certain firing profiles which as a result causes them to group together according to these specific
subfields. These firing patters were different in some degree depending on weather on successful
and unsuccessful memory – and thus suggest each subfield processes memories in a different
way.