Center for Neuroscience

People love stories. We find it easier to remember events when they are part of an overarching narrative. But in real life, the chapters of a story don’t follow smoothly one from another. Other things happen in between. A new brain imaging study from the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, shows that the hippocampus is the brain’s storyteller, connecting separate, distant events into a single narrative. The work is published Sept. 29 in Current Biology.

We watch a ball as it falls into our glove. We hear a strange sound in another part of the house and listen intently. In neuroscience, the act of narrowing our senses in response to an environmental event is called “attention,” and it is understood that when we attend to a stimulus, we lose the ability to focus on other surrounding inputs.

The University of California, Davis, today named the recipients of the 2021 Chancellor’s Innovation Awards. The awards recognize faculty, project teams and community partners for their work, dedication and success in improving the lives of others and addressing the needs of our global society through innovative solutions. David E.

While drugs help patients mitigate the most extreme conditions of mental illnesses like schizophrenia or depression, they often don’t address the cognitive deficits many diseases cause, such as memory loss, low attention span and impaired decision-making.

Charan Ranganath, Ph.D., UC Davis professor of psychology at the Center for Neuroscience, was a guest on the Every Little Thing podcast episode Memory Game: Did This Meal Really Happen? on May 10, 2021. Dr. Ranganath spoke with hosts Annette Heist and Jorge Just about how we form memories and the tricky nature of deciding about whether a memory is "true." Listen to the full episode here.

“This table feels hard,” said Assistant Professor Rishidev Chaudhuri, who sat in his office at the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience. “That’s something that emerges at the collective population level.”

How individual particles come together to spontaneously create new structures is a question pondered by many physicists. The concept underlying that question—collective behavior—also intrigues neuroscientists.

This article originally appeared on the Spectrum site.

Exposure to infection in utero may speed up the expression of many genes linked to autism — and hasten changes in brain anatomy.

The results are in mice but hint at how infections during pregnancy may contribute to autism.

Consciousness, perception, memory, behavior. Questions about how exactly our brains carry out these functions, and much more, have long tantalized neuroscientists. Definitive answers aren’t easy to come by in science, but one thing is clear to Professor W. Martin Usrey, of the Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior.