George Dragoi

our "Untangling the Mind" tour with NatGeo is ready for liftoff again this Fall and throughout Spring '26!

this show is meant for anyone interested in science and the brain because neuroscience belongs to everyone 🧠

info + tour dates 👇🏽!

live.nationalgeographic.org/event/untang...

The Brain Navigates New Spaces By ‘Flickering’ Between Reality and Old Mental Maps A new Yale study reveals the brain's internal map doesn't just track one’s current location, it constantly "flickers" between the present space and remembered

medicine.yale.edu/news-article...
A beautiful take on our latest research article

Interesting theta sequence-replay-learning relationships! Consistent with Winson's '78 work on theta disruption impairing learning and our (Farooq & Dragoi '19; DOI: 10.1126/science.aav0502) work on emergence of preplay and waking rest replay prior to theta sequences during rat postnatal development

Special thanks to Yuchen Zhou and Jeremie Sibille
for their dedication and critical contribution to this study

Flickering, representational drift, and theta sequences collectively depict non-local HPC representations of recalled/imagined experiences at peak theta phases opposite to local/present experiences at theta troughs, driven by predictive, internal generative network processes

Post-detour plastic network reconfiguration during sleep causes representational drift during the post-detour reversal condition compared to original pre-detour, and theta flickering of the alternate representations

Using a detour task, we found that time-compressed theta sequences on the novel detour emerge rapidly in laps 1-2 and can be predicted in part from the preplay events expressed during the preceding pre-detour sleep before expression of detour replay

Generative emergence of non-local representations in the hippocampus Nature Communications - How the interplay between internal and external network drives shapes the representation of the world is not fully understood. The authors show that internal generative...

We reveal what theta sequences, representational drift, and flickering between alternate representations (as forms of non-local spatial representations) have in common and how and when they emerge and express via internal generative processes. Please check our open access article here: rdcu.be/eCGWt