Category Archives: History

Ranck Symposium, 2016

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Good time to remember the Ranck Symposium four years ago, Sept 7, 2016. Jim discovered head-direction cells in 1984, with full-reports in 1990 (pub 1 and pub 2). Jim’s 90th birthday last week. Remarkable set of talk, all in one day. Below is the sequence with video links. (Some messiness with the videos).

  1. Charles Nicholson Brain Impedance, Stimulation, and Extracellular Space
  2. Lynn Nadel, PhD – Finding Our Direction in the Early Days of Cognitive Map Theory
  3. John O’Keefe – Place Cells in the Hippocampus, Past and Present
  4. Phillip J Best, PhD – No Kidding They Really Were Place Cells
  5. John Kubie, PhD – The Hippocampus in Brooklyn; Head Direction Cells and Beyond
  6. Bruce L McNaughton, PhD – Mechanisms of Place Field Formation Still a Mystery after all these year
  7.  Neil Burgess, PhD – Neural Mechanisms of Spatial Cognition
  8. David W Tank, PhD – Place Cell Dynamics During Navigation
  9. Jeffrey S Taube, PhD – Jim Got Me Headed in the Right Direction
  10.  György Buzsáki, MD, PhD & Adrien Peyrache, PhD – Jim’s Work Pointed to the Right Direction
  11.  Nachum Ulanovsky, PhD – Neural Basis of 3D Goal Directed Navigation in Bats
  12. Howard Eichenbaum, PhD – Ranck’s Rule Reflections on the Behavioral Correlates of Hippocampal Neurons
  13. Matt Shapiro, PhD – Place Cells and Memory
  14. Wendy A Suzuki, PhD – How the Hippocampus Learns from Errors
  15. André Fenton, PhD – Signal in the Noise Non Local Spatial Information in Place and Head Direction
  16. Jim Knierim, PhD – Local Cue Influences on Place Cells Objects, Vectors, and Textures
  17. Steven E Fox, PhD – Thoughts and Comments
  18.  James B Ranck, Jr , MD Thoughts and Comments

Interview with Jim Ranck, discoverer of Head-Direction cells

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May 7, 2019,  Andre Fenton and I interview Jim Ranck. The interview is quite long — 90 minutes — and is organized in a decade-by-decade manner. For each segment we discuss Jim’s personal history, his scientific accomplishments, and some major events in Neuroscience.

watch, above, or go directly to youtube: https://youtu.be/i6hIVqXPNdQ

The interview contains lots of hippocampal minutia. Best suited for people in the field … but I think there are other gems.

The timeline is something like this:

0:00:00    1930-40s birth thru college: 
0:04:50    1950s  med school, Univ chicago, Public Health 
0:20:10    1960s  Univ Washington, Biophysics, Brain Impedance, Mich
0:31:00    1970s  Hippocampal Neurons, O'Keefe & Nadel
                  Phil Best, place cells are real
0:48:00    1975   Move to Brooklyn, single neurons
1:08:43    1980s  (part 1) computerized data collection and
                  analysis
1:10:40    1980s  (part 2) Head-Direction cells. Ego and allocentric
1:22:55    1990s  Cognitive Neuroscience, the book.

Most important segment is on discovery and description of Head-Direction Cells,
1:10:40 – 1:23:00