Constructing Our World: How the Human Brain Builds Narratives from Everyday Experiences

• Applicant: Dr. Xenia Grande
• Subject Area: Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550158511

To guide our everyday decisions and social interactions, we organise events by when and where they happened: we build narratives of the world. This process is not trivial as we often have to link entangled and indirectly experienced events that are reported by others. The fundamental neural mechanisms that support narrative building remain unclear. My proposed project aims to study how the human brain organises and binds events into coherent narratives. As the brain’s key area to narrative building, I will focus on the hippocampus (HC) and its circuitry with the entorhinal cortex (EC). With an innovative cross-scale approach, I will study narrative building from cells to systems level, overcoming the temporal and spatial limits of non-invasive methods to study the human brain. First, I will use advanced ultra-high-field imaging to identify how events are tagged by their where/when content in the EC, and how that information reaches the HC via anatomical loops. Second, using novel computational analyses I will investigate how events are bound into narratives through replay-like reactivation, organized along their where/when content. Third, I will complement our non-invasive findings with high temporal resolution measures from intracranial human cell recordings, provided by a collaborator. The project will be carried out at a world-leading cognitive neuroscience hub with an interdisciplinary research group as host that has pioneered this cross-scale approach to study human cognition. This is an ideal setup for knowledge transfer from the host to the applicant (computational analyses, cross-scale methods) and essential for the applicant's career development. The proposed project will provide unprecedented insights into coherent narrative building, a fundamental aspect of human cognition and reveal important features of the human brain that contribute to a well-functioning mind, able to comprehend the world around us.

• DFG Programme: WBP Fellowship
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Host: Dr. Helen Barron