BIO SCI 38 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Dentate Gyrus, Episodic Memory, Neurophysiology
13 Jan 2020
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Document Summary
Lecture: pattern separation and pattern completion in the hippocampus. Pattern separation and pattern completion in the hippocampus. Pattern separation is a neuronal computation where noisy and highly overlapping inputs to a structure are made more dissimilar (orthogonal) at the output level. Computational models, neurophysiology, and empirical evidence all indicate that the dentate gyrus plays a critical role in pattern separation of episodic memories. Pattern completion is a neuronal computation where a partial list of inputs can drive an autoassociative process to activate the rest of the neurons encoding the episodic memory. The ca3 region of the hippocampus, due to its high degree of recurrent connectivity, is a critical site for pattern completion of episodic memories. The associative connectivity in the cortex may be too low to support the rapid changes needed to associate patterns of activation distributed widely across the neocortex (rolls and treves, 1998). Each cortical neuron has ~10k synapses but there are 16b neurons in the human neocortex.
