Edvard Moser: ¿Innato o Aprendido? De la filosofía a la neurociencia moderna

Are we born with a sense of space, or do we learn it through experience? Likewise, do we come into the world with a sense of time? These questions, posed by classical philosophy, remain very much alive today in neuroscience. Norwegian scientist Edvard Moser, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014 for the discovery of so-called grid cells, will take as his starting point the philosophical debates between empiricism and innate ideas to discuss the most recent neuronal research on space and time in neuroscience. Are space and time innate? And, if so, what exactly is inherited?

During the lecture, we will discover that the ability to locate ourselves in space and time depends on complex neuronal networks which, located in specific regions of the brain, contain specialized cell types that encode position. For example, place cells in the hippocampus and grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex, which can now be monitored thanks to recent technological advances. These developments have revealed that thousands of grid cells create an internal map of our own location that appears not to depend on experience. Moser will also explain how the brain measures time through the activity of certain cells, such that our perception of time changes depending on what we experience.

A unique opportunity to see how science has moved from philosophical debate to the laboratory, and to learn first-hand about the discoveries that transformed our understanding of the brain and earned Moser the Nobel Prize.

Speaker:
Edvard Moser, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2014. He holds a degree in Psychology and a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Oslo, and is Scientific Co-Director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Professor of Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. His research focuses on neuronal computation in the brain and the representation of space, time, and memory. Among other awards, he has received the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2011), the Perl-UNC Prize in Neuroscience (2012), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (2013), the Karl Spencer Lashley Award (2014), the Körber European Science Prize (2014), was elected a Foreign Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2014), and received the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav (2018). He is also a member, among others, of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London.

Moderator:
Mara Dierssen, MD and PhD in Neurobiology from the University of Cantabria. She leads the Cellular and Systems Neurobiology group within the Systems Biology Programme at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona. A leading science communicator and researcher in brain health.

Date and Place
Saturday, 17 January, at 6:00 p.m. at Museo de la Cience CosmoCaixa.

Registration and More Information: https://cosmocaixa.org/es/p/-innato-o-aprendido-de-la-filosofia-a-la-neurociencia-moder