Self-avoidance dominates the selection of hippocampal replay

Spontaneous neural activity sequences are generated by the brain in the absence of external input ^1–12 , yet how they are produced remains unknown. During immobility, hippocampal replay sequences depict spatial paths related to the animal’s past experience or predicted future ¹³ . By recording from large ensembles of hippocampal place cells ¹⁴ in combination with optogenetic manipulation of cortical input in freely behaving rats, we show here that the selection of hippocampal replay is governed by a novel self-avoidance principle. Following movement cessation, replay of the animal’s past path is strongly avoided, while replay of the future path predominates. Moreover, when the past and future paths overlap, early replays avoid both and depict entirely different trajectories. Further, replays avoid self-repetition, on a shorter timescale compared to the avoidance of previous behavioral trajectories. Eventually, several seconds into the stopping period, replay of the past trajectory dominates. This temporal organization contrasts with established and recent predictions ^9,10,15,16 but is well-recapitulated by a symmetry-breaking attractor model of sequence generation in which individual neurons adapt their firing rates over time ^26–35 . However, while the model is sufficient to produce avoidance of recently traversed or reactivated paths, it requires an additional excitatory input into recently activated cells to produce the later window of past-dominance. We performed optogenetic perturbations to demonstrate that this input is provided by medial entorhinal cortex, revealing its role in maintaining a memory of past experience that biases hippocampal replay. Together, these data provide specific evidence for how hippocampal replays are generated.