Mathematical Biology Seminar Jim Heys, Neurobiology and Anatomy, U of Utah Wednesday, September 30, 2020 3:05pm on Zoom How the brain keeps track of space and time Abstract: Many functions of the nervous system, such as learning and memory, inferring cause and effect, and predicting future outcomes, depend upon the brain?s ability to perceive and form memories of the temporal duration of events. Despite progress in establishing the neural basis of timing on the scale of milliseconds and circadian timing over hours, many fundamental questions remain about time encoding on the intermediate scale of interval timing (i.e. seconds to minutes). In this talk, I will discuss a series of findings that we have made to investigate how interval time is represented in the brain. To address this question, we have developed a novel behavioral approach (Heys and Dombeck, 2018) and a novel surgical and optical approach to enable large-scale, cellular-resolution functional imaging in medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) in the behaving mouse (Heys et al., 2014). By combining these imaging and behavioral methods, we discovered a previously unknown population of neurons in MEC that encode interval time, whereby individual time-encoding neurons become regularly activated at a specific moment during an interval timing task (Heys and Dombeck, 2018). We then established that MEC is critical for interval timing during learning, but may not be necessary for perceiving time after learning has occurred (Heys et al., 2020).