Neuroscientists pinpoint how adaptation lives in the brain

The human brain is largely credited with human flourishing over millennia.  A longstanding question, however, is what are the happenings in the human brain that have critically enabled human adaptation?

The human brain’s ability to create mental representations of a physical space within a structure important for memory called the hippocampus crucially allows humans to navigate and subsequently adapt to their environment. But this is not all that the hippocampus does in the way of human adaptation, a recent study done at the California Institute of Technology suggests. The hippocampus importantly is also where representations of non-physical, abstract rules that are generated in learning and adaptation are made.

Courellis and coworkers showed to volunteer epilepsy patients a set of images that had left or right action associated with each image in multiple trials whereby the pairings of image with action would change. Study participants were tasked with, either spontaneously or with verbal clues, determining the pairing pattern of the set of images and actions in a trial. Participants were expected to use this pattern to infer other image-action pairs in future trials. In recordings of single neuron activity, Courellis et al. observed a change in hippocampus neuron activity in participants who inferred correctly, but no corresponding change in incorrectly inferring participants. This change was especially rapid in trials where verbal guidance was provided, illustrating the power of verbal instruction in learning.

This study leaves us with fascinating new insights into the neuroscience behind human flourishing and human adaptations to come – many thanks to our hippocampus. It also provokes questions about how hippocampal activity may change with age and across situations, and whether and how other important cognitive activities that occur in the hippocampus such as memory may integrate with learning and adaptation.

This study was led by Hristos Courellis and Juri Minxha, both at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and California Institute of Technology.

Managing Correspondant: Wilaysha Evans

Press Article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02433-2

Original Journal Article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07799-x

Image Credit: b0red/Pixabay