2026 Heiligenberg Lecture

NEURAL MECHANISMS IN MEMORY CIRCUITS FOR IMAGINING THE FUTURE

Mental exploration can be flexibly used to evaluate potential future choices, thereby guiding decision-making without requiring real-world iterations. Although it is known that the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center, is active while imagining the future, the precise mechanisms that support mental exploration of future choices remain unclear. Our work has revealed novel neural network mechanisms in the rodent hippocampus in support of mental exploration. We will see that place cells, an output of the brain’s GPS center, not only represent our current spatial location, but can also be used as a readout to discover how memory centers of the brain use stored information to imagine future outcomes and plan future trajectories. In particular, the brain can use oscillation patterns to switch between searching the past and imagining the future while also representing the current location. Furthermore, we found that neural activity that represents future paths or imagined events is dependent on network computations in a select subregion of the hippocampus—the dentate gyrus—a sparse neuronal network particularly vulnerable during aging. Please join us to learn about these neural circuits in support of behavior, which were identified with support by the Walter F. Heiligenberg endowment to UC San Diego for innovative work in the field of neuroethology.

About the Lecturer

Jill K. Leutgeb, Ph.D.
Walter F. Heiligenberg Professor of Neuroethology, Professor of Neurobiology
Neurobiology Department, School of Biological Sciences
Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind
University of California, San Diego

Jill K. Leutgeb is the Walter F. Heiligenberg Professor of Neuroethology and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin, Germany. She received the Early Career Award from the Ray Thomas Edwards Foundation and the Young Researcher Prize in the Natural Sciences from the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.

The Walter Heiligenberg Lectures are sponsored by the School of Biological Sciences and recognize seminal contributions to neuroethology and to identifying the function of neural circuits for behavior.