Open to All: Dementia, Creativity, and Open Ecosystem Innovation.

In the health arena, open innovation approaches strive to address real-world complexity through driving multi-stakeholder collaborative activities that can better identify and respond to complex health needs. This paper will argue for the value of an open ecosystem innovation approach, one that explores the full implications of what it means to be "open" in a health innovation context. To these ends, the paper will outline the origins of open innovation in the health arena, suggesting that it has become an important site for pushing the limits of open methods and challenging mainstream conceptions of the targets of health innovation. Five guiding principles for open ecosystem innovation will then be proposed, drawing on learning from the Knowledge Exchange Hubs for the Creative Economy funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council. These principles point to a configuration of open activities that are maximally sensitive to (1) knowledge diversity in innovation work; (2) the consequences of adopting an open-orientation across all stages of innovation programming; (3) the value of deepening and broadening the targets of innovation activity; (4) the role of mediation in supporting cross-sector partnerships; and, (5) the importance of operating in an adaptive and sustainable manner in the long-term. A follow-on project from the AHRC Hubs-Dementia Connect-sought to apply this learning to an important health focus: dementia and the role played by creative participation in delivering important health outcomes. Through Dementia Connect, the applicability of open ecosystem innovation thinking was assessed, revealing the conditions under which it might deliver innovation-led improvements to the quality of life for those living with a dementia diagnosis. A detailed blueprint for conducting open ecosystem innovation is then proposed in full-a new and comprehensive response to the complex reality of living with a dementia diagnosis today.

Emotion, rationality, and decision-making: how to link affective and social neuroscience with social theory.

In this paper, we argue for a stronger engagement between concepts in affective and social neuroscience on the one hand, and theories from the fields of anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology on the other. Affective and social neuroscience could provide an additional assessment of social theories. We argue that some of the most influential social theories of the last four decades-rational choice theory, behavioral economics, and post-structuralism-contain assumptions that are inconsistent with key findings in affective and social neuroscience. We also show that another approach from the social sciences-plural rationality theory-shows greater compatibility with these findings. We further claim that, in their turn, social theories can strengthen affective and social neuroscience. The former can provide more precise formulations of the social phenomena that neuroscientific models have targeted, can help neuroscientists who build these models become more aware of their social and cultural biases, and can even improve the models themselves. To illustrate, we show how plural rationality theory can be used to further specify and test the somatic marker hypothesis. Thus, we aim to accelerate the much-needed merger of social theories with affective and social neuroscience.

Social theory and the cognitive-emotional brain.

Pessoa's (2013) arguments imply that various leading approaches in the social sciences have not adequately conceptualized how emotion and cognition influence human decision making and social behavior. This is particularly unfortunate, as these approaches have been central to the efforts to build bridges between neuroscience and the social sciences. We argue that it would be better to base these efforts on other social theories that appear more compatible with Pessoa's analysis of the brain.

Theta phase-specific codes for two-dimensional position, trajectory and heading in the hippocampus.

Temporal coding is a means of representing information by the time, as opposed to the rate, at which neurons fire. Evidence of temporal coding in the hippocampus comes from place cells, whose spike times relative to theta oscillations reflect a rat's position while running along stereotyped trajectories. This arises from the backwards shift in cell firing relative to local theta oscillations (phase precession). Here we demonstrate phase precession during place-field crossings in an open-field foraging task. This produced spike sequences in each theta cycle that disambiguate the rat's trajectory through two-dimensional space and can be used to predict movement direction. Furthermore, position and movement direction were maximally predicted from firing in the early and late portions of the theta cycle, respectively. This represents the first direct evidence of a combined representation of position, trajectory and heading in the hippocampus, organized on a fine temporal scale by theta oscillations.

Gamma oscillatory firing reveals distinct populations of pyramidal cells in the CA1 region of the hippocampus.

Hippocampal place cells that fire together within the same cycle of theta oscillations represent the sequence of positions (movement trajectory) that a rat traverses on a linear track. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the encoding of these and other types of temporal memory sequences is organized by gamma oscillations nested within theta oscillations. Here, we examined whether gamma-related firing of place cells permits such discrete temporal coding. We found that gamma-modulated CA1 pyramidal cells separated into two classes on the basis of gamma firing phases during waking theta periods. These groups also differed in terms of their spike waveforms, firing rates, and burst firing tendency. During gamma oscillations one group's firing became restricted to theta phases associated with the highest gamma power. Consequently, on the linear track, cells in this group often failed to fire early in theta-phase precession (as the rat entered the place field) if gamma oscillations were present. The second group fired throughout the theta cycle during gamma oscillations, and maintained gamma-modulated firing at different stages of theta-phase precession. Our results suggest that the two different pyramidal cell classes may support different types of population codes within a theta cycle: one in which spike sequences representing movement trajectories occur across subsequent gamma cycles nested within each theta cycle, and another in which firing in synchronized gamma discharges without temporal sequences encode a representation of location. We propose that gamma oscillations during theta-phase precession organize the mnemonic recall of population patterns representing places and movement paths.

Reactivation of experience-dependent cell assembly patterns in the hippocampus.

The hippocampus is thought to be involved in episodic memory formation by reactivating traces of waking experience during sleep. Indeed, the joint firing of spatially tuned pyramidal cells encoding nearby places recur during sleep. We found that the sleep cofiring of rat CA1 pyramidal cells encoding similar places increased relative to the sleep session before exploration. This cofiring increase depended on the number of times that cells fired together with short latencies (<50 ms) during exploration, and was strongest between cells representing the most visited places. This is indicative of a Hebbian learning rule in which changes in firing associations between cells are determined by the number of waking coincident firing events. In contrast, cells encoding different locations reduced their cofiring in proportion to the number of times that they fired independently. Together these data indicate that reactivated patterns are shaped by both positive and negative changes in cofiring, which are determined by recent behavior.