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Social memory · sleep · evolution
Adithya Sarma · neuroscientist
How do animalsremember one another?
I am Adithya Sarma, a neuroscientist studying how animals recognise individuals, remember social experiences, and change their behaviour in response to the groups around them.
Read more↓The question
My research asks how a social world is represented in memory. An animal must recognise who it has met, distinguish one individual from another, and update those memories as its group changes. I use mice and fruit flies to ask why this capacity evolved and how social experience reaches beyond memory to alter processes such as sleep. I also care about the world in which that science is made: an academia that treats people as people, not output, and that values inclusion, safety and mentorship as seriously as discovery.
03 / Essays
Essays, arguments and notes
I write about science as a way of knowing and academia as a place of work. I am interested in its hidden rules and inequalities, why toxicity is so often tolerated, and how we can build institutions that do not reduce people to papers, grants or productivity. Better mentorship is not separate from better science.
04 / Apps
Useful things, built for the lab and life beyond it.
01 / Research
Why does an organism need social memory?
My long-term aim is to understand how social memory evolved: how a brain distinguishes many individuals, stores those relationships, and turns them into a usable representation of a group.
During my PhD, I developed a paradigm for long-term social recognition in mice and studied how sleep loss disrupts access to those memories. In parallel, I examined group-living fruit flies and found social interactions that actively wake other flies and reshape sleep across days. I now study how repeated experiences are reorganised into semantic-like knowledge in the prefrontal cortex. Together, these projects support a comparative programme: to identify conserved social-memory circuitry, understand its adaptive value, and explain how an organism continuously stores and distinguishes the individuals within its group.
02 / Media & press
Media & press
Selected interviews and coverage of my work on social memory, sleep, and group behaviour in mice and fruit flies, alongside awards and conversations about life in research.
This archive includes scientific press coverage, my BCN interview after the PhD, the UKrant feature on wake-inducing interactions in fruit flies, and recognition of my research and academic journey.