How neural emergent dynamics creates the perception of abstract space-time

All animals move in space, as a function of time, hence they must have a very clear perception of space and time. How are space-time represented in the brain? What are the environmental and biophysical mechanisms by which the mental maps of space-time are constructed? Pioneering research done over the last three decades has answered the first question, resulting in the Nobel Prize in 2014. They found that a brain circuit called the hippocampus contains neurons that are activated as a function of the precise location of the subject in space. Hence, these neurons are termed “place cells”. Further, they recently discovered that a connected circuit, the entorhinal cortex, contains neurons that fire at the vertices of a triangular lattice that tiles the entire environment explored by the subject, and these neurons are called “grid cells”. The challenge now is to understand the emergent mechanisms by which these fascinating mental maps of space emerge, and their role in encoding time. There are two key difficulties in tackling this challenge. First, it has not possible to precisely measure and manipulate the multisensory stimuli that create space-time perception. Second, the experimental and analytical techniques to measure and decipher the neural emergent dynamics have been lacking. I will describe accomplishments and opportunities, both experimental and analytical, in tackling these challenges. In particular, I will discuss the novel, multisensory virtual reality approaches and tools to measure neural signals with high spatio-temporal precision.