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Does the familiar route home feel the same every day? It does – yet remarkable things are happening in the brain. Our brain stores an internal model of the environment for this very purpose, but this inner representation of the outside world is not fixed in a single brain region. Instead, it is being continually 'reconfigured', even though our behaviour and perception remain stable. This phenomenon, known as 'representation drift', will now be studied in depth by Jonas‑Frederic Sauer, Professor of Physiology at Saarland University. The European Research Council has awarded Sauer an ERC Consolidator Grant worth around €2 million to support this fundamental research.
The following text has been machine translated from the German with no human editing.
'When we walk down the street where we live or smell our favourite food, it doesn't feel any different from one day to the next. Nevertheless, the associated neural representations in the brain are different,' says Jonas-Frederic Sauer. Our behaviour and perception of our surroundings remain the same, while the processes stored in the brain for this purpose are constantly changing. 'Today, we know very precisely which regions of the brain are activated when we want to orient ourselves in a room, pick up certain sounds or perceive familiar smells. However, imaging techniques allow us to see that the activities of the neurons involved change repeatedly, i.e. over several weeks, and that individual brain regions are affected to varying degrees,' explains Jonas-Frederic Sauer, who has been conducting research at the Centre for Integrative Physiology and Molecular Medicine (CIPMM) on the Homburg campus since the beginning of the year.
Stable communication between brain areas despite constant change
His research team recently discovered that the prefrontal cortex, which plays an important role in thinking and problem solving, changes less significantly than other brain regions. 'Neural coding seems to be more firmly anchored there than in the hippocampus, for example, where place cells are stored that help us with spatial orientation. The regions of the brain where we process sensory information such as smells are also subject to greater change," explains the physiology professor. Why we nevertheless behave consistently and can remember many things unchanged is still an unsolved mystery in science. 'We want to address this question in our research project and investigate how the individual regions of the brain communicate with each other. In particular, we will focus on the question of how brain areas can exchange information in a stable manner, even if the representation drift occurs at different speeds in these areas,' says Jonas-Frederic Sauer. His research team will use various methods, ranging from imaging techniques and electrophysiology to novel computational methods.
Model for artificial neural networks
This basic research aims to provide a better understanding of how neural networks process information from the environment. 'This also plays a role in how we learn and store content in the long term. However, our findings will certainly also be of interest to the field of artificial intelligence research, as the human brain has continuously optimized itself throughout evolution and can therefore also serve as a model for artificial neural networks,' says the physiology professor.
The project 'Deciphering the logic of representational drift and its conversion to stable readouts' will receive a total of around two million euros in funding from the European Research Council (ERC) over the next five years. It is expected to start in mid-2026.
Further information:
European Research Council press release: https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news
Research group at the Center for Integrative Physiology and Molecular Medicine (CIPMM): https://cipmm.uni-saarland.de/en/physiology/ag-sauer/research-ag-sauer
Questions answered by:
Prof. Dr Jonas-Frederic Sauer
Saarland University/CIPMM
Tel.: +49-6841-16-16373
Email: jonas.sauer [at] uni-saarland.de
