Speaker : Michael BREAKSPEAR, University of New Castle school of Science.
"The hippocampal latent diffusion engine: a computational framework for memory, perception, and cognitive dysfunction"
The hippocampus is a cognitive hub whose functions are disrupted in most major neurodegenerative dementias. Drawing on recent advances in generative artificial intelligence and systems neuroscience, we conceptualize the hippocampus as a latent diffusion engine that compresses sensory, internal, and cognitive inputs into low-dimensional representations and then regenerates percepts, episodic memories, and imagined scenes for cortical integration. Travelling waves of cortico-hippocampal oscillations, aligned with large-scale functional gradients, schedule and structure this generative process, organizing distributed neural activity into coherent, semantically grounded constructs. We also demonstrate how major neurodegenerative dementias - including the Alzheimer’s disease spectrum - can be interpreted as selective breakdowns of the anatomical and computational components of this proposed architecture.
Hosted by Jacobo SITT
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