Livia de Hoz

I was born in the beautiful city of Salamanca in Spain. It was there that I first heard about neurons. As a result of that one lecture, I ended up studying biology in Madrid and doing a PhD in neuroscience in Edinburgh. My career has focused on learning and memory, from spatial memories to auditory memories, always trying to understand how memory helps our brain make sense of the world that surrounds us. After Edinburgh I have been in Berlin, Jerusalem, Göttingen and Berlin again, a variety that I have enjoyed very much.

Your brain is a natural statistician: it listens even when you don't
The environment surrounding each of us is made of a myriad of sounds, images or odours, in combinations that are continuously changing, often in predictable ways. Our brain readily detects and learns these patterns, often automatically, independently of its immediate relevance. This form of learning, known as statistical learning, is essential for our brain to be able to separate stimuli into background and foreground, which in turn allows the detection of unexpected changes that might predict danger. The auditory system is a natural statistician.