Brain and Intelligence Seminar NO.38

On April 28, the 38th Brain and Intelligence Seminar was successfully held. This session featured Prof. George Dragoi, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine, who presented a talk entitled “The generative grammar of internal representations in the brain”.

How does the brain anticipate and encode future experiences? This is one of the central questions in systems neuroscience. In his talk, Prof. George Dragoi proposed a revolutionary theoretical framework—the "generative grammar of the brain".

Using large-scale electrophysiological recordings in rodents, Prof. Dragoi demonstrated that hippocampal networks are not solely shaped by past experience but are intrinsically organized prior to learning. This phenomenon, known as "network preconfiguration," reveals that during rest or sleep, the hippocampus expresses sequences of place cell activity that will later occur during spatial behavior. These pre-formed neural activity patterns not only provide a structural scaffold for subsequent memory encoding but also constrain and facilitate the formation of new memories.

Prof. Dragoi's research framework challenges the traditional experience-driven model of memory and advances a paradigm shift toward an internally structured mechanism of memory. He redefines the hippocampus as a generative system—not merely a recorder of memories, but a constructor of cognitive representations. This perspective places hippocampal function within a broader cognitive landscape: supporting not only spatial navigation and episodic memory, but also imagination, reasoning, and active representation of the world.

The Brain and Intelligence Seminar aims to promote subject integration and in-depth exchanges in the fields of brain science and artificial intelligence and create a relaxed and open academic exchange atmosphere for teachers and students to jointly discuss the cutting-edge scientific trends of brain and intelligence. We look forward to more experts, scholars and young talents joining us to jointly promote the prosperity and development of frontier fields related to brain and intelligence.