If I get lost in the woods, how do I get home?
My brain knows…
I hope… *gulp*
Sometimes I read science and I'm just floored by how much we DON'T know about the world
we're living in.
For example, how does your brain, a lump of tissue stuck in your head, know where it is,
where it's going and where it's been in three dimensional space?
It's not like it has GPS, right?
… Well… maybe it does.
Sorta?
Kinda?
This week, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was handed out to Prof John O'Keefe and Edvard
and May-Britt Moser for their studies of the brain's internal navigation systems.
In the 1970s, O'Keefe discovered neurons that he called, "place cells," that fire only when
an animal is in a particular spot.
The news didn't take off in the media, but other researchers continued plugging away.
Then in 2005, the Moser's, working with O'Keefe in London, found a set of cells in the brains
of rats which helped them navigate.
They called them "grid cells," and according to write-ups in Scientific American and Nature,
they're like a map, or a navigational chart.
The cells help us place ourselves and know where we are.
Their research showed animals were creating a quote, "representation of the external world
inside their brains," said Dr Colin Lever, from the University of Durham one of their
colleagues.
The grid cells reside in part of the hippocampus called the entorhinal cortex.
By attaching extra sensitive sensors that can detect the firing of INDIVIDUAL neurons,
the researchers found the neurons fired and created a near PERFECT hexagonal grid of locations
in the rat's brain to map the space it explored.
This is pretty incredible stuff to say the least.
Why a hexagon?
GLAD YOU ASKED!
Hexagons, like in a honeycomb, are the most efficient shapes possible.
You get the most map with the least effort.
The simplicity is just… it's… wow.
Nature created the most efficient way to map a space!
They did the experiments again and again, and kept getting the same information.
This was a secret language that existed deep in a rat’s brain all this time, and when
they attached electrodes to the cells in the brain of a rat, they revealed the grid in
real life.
They won the Nobel Prize almost ten years later because the 2005 discovery alone wasn't
enough.
They kept producing more and more research on how these grid cells worked, and how it
tied into growth and development, memory, disease and so on and so on.
For example, the Mosers hypothesize the grid cells form within a few weeks of birth, and
then develop as we learn to explore our world.
They also guess, because the entorhinal cortex is one of the first parts of the brain to
succumb to Alzheimer's, that these cells might be why sufferers can't recall where they've
been or where they ARE!
Knowing how we map things can help us develop a better understanding of human development.
These Nobel winners have no desire to slow down; they want to map how the grid cells
integrate into the brain, develop and grow and how the grid will change if instead of
a flat cage the rat is reared in a sphere.
Which was where my thoughts went...
I want to know about three dimensions!
In space, you can't just make a grid.
There's no flat world to map.
Is this why Kahn lost in the original Wrath of Kahn?!
A two dimensional mind in a three dimensional world?
If we were born in space, would we develop a three dimensional grid?
I dunno.
But holy crap my brain hurts even thinking about it.
So it's not GPS, but it does help you map your apartment or where the milk is in a store!
That's useful!
Do you have a good sense of direction?
Can you wander your house in the dark?