PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Kenneth Kay
AU  - Jason E. Chung
AU  - Marielena Sosa
AU  - Jonathan S. Schor
AU  - Mattias P. Karlsson
AU  - Margaret C. Larkin
AU  - Daniel F. Liu
AU  - Loren M. Frank
TI  - Constant sub-second cycling between representations of possible futures in the hippocampus
AID  - 10.1101/528976
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 528976
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/05/08/528976.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/05/08/528976.full
AB  - Cognitive faculties such as imagination, planning, and decision-making entail the ability to project into the future. Crucially, animal behavior in natural settings implies that the brain can generate representations of future scenarios not only quickly but also constantly over time, as external events continually unfold. Despite this insight, how the brain accomplishes this remains unknown. Here we report neural activity in the hippocampus encoding two future scenarios (two upcoming maze paths) in constant alternation at 8 Hz: one scenario per 8 Hz cycle (125 ms). We further found that the underlying cycling dynamic generalized across multiple hippocampal representations (location and direction) relevant to future behavior. These findings identify an extremely fast and regular dynamical process capable of representing future possibilities.