School of Biomedical Sciences cordially invites you to join the following seminar:

Speaker: Dr. Akiko Hayashi-Takagi, Team Director, Riken Center for Brain Science, Japan
Talk Title: Human-specific fast synaptic kinetics enable rapid detection of predictive features

Date: 09 October 2025 (Thursday)
Time: 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm
Venue: LT2, G/F, Lecture Theatre 2, William M.W. Mong Block, Faculty of Medicine Building
Host: Professor Michael Hӓusser

Biography

Akiko Hayashi-Takagi, M.D., Ph.D., is the Team Director of the Multi-scale Psychiatry Research Team at RIKEN. Her research focuses on unraveling the operational principles of the brain and the mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders, with a particular emphasis on synaptic structure and function, synaptic plasticity, and neural circuit dynamics that govern behavior. She has pioneered innovative imaging techniques to clarify multi-scale biological systems and strives to prove causal links in pathophysiology, aiming to develop novel treatments based on these findings. Hayashi-Takagi’s work bridges neuroscience, psychiatry, and translational research, shedding light on molecular, cellular, and systemic changes in mental illnesses and contributing to the development of pharmacological interventions targeting neural signaling abnormalities and synaptic dysfunction.

Abstract

Humans can identify subtle features in complex environments, but the cellular basis of this ability is unclear. By comparing layer 2/3 cortical pyramidal neurons in five mammals (mouse, rat, marmoset, macaque and human), we found that human neurons exhibited distinctively faster kinetics of excitatory synaptic currents. In a computational model, neurons with human-type synapses detected hidden patterns more quickly in noise, and this superiority was particularly evident in unsupervised learning. Tracking synaptic weights revealed that human synapses were potentiated sharply and persistently by patterns, while macaque-type synapses were broadly potentiated, which were easily eroded by noise. These data suggest that the human-specific acceleration of synaptic kinetics enables the rapid extraction of latent structures in complex environments, providing a cellular basis for our advanced cognitive abilities.

ALL ARE WELCOME.