《mapping your every move》.pdfVIP

Cerebrum, March 2014 Mapping Your Every Move By Edvard Moser, Ph.D., and May-Britt Moser, Ph.D. Editor’s Note: In 2005, our authors discovered grid cells, which are types of neurons that are central to how the brain calculates location and navigation. Since that time, they have worked to learn how grid cells communicate with other types of neurons—place cells, border cells, and head direction cells—to affect spatial awareness, memory, and decision-making. Because the entorhinal cortex, which contains the grid-cell navigation system, is often damaged in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, future research to better understand how cognitive ability and memory are lost has great potential significance for the treatment of Alzheimer’s and other neurological disorders. 1 Cerebrum, March 2014 The most advanced surveillance system you will ever find is built into your own brain and nurtured by evolution. It comes equipped with a coding system that stockpiles and maps your lifetime of events in high definition. Through new research tools and insights, scientists are gradually coming to understand this coding system and its intrinsic mathematical principles. Researchers have long known that different kinds of neurons play different roles in the brain, but only in the past few decades have scientists had access to the imaging and measurement tools they need to see how different neurons react when the brain is challenged with different tasks. We have focused on understanding how the brain helps us navigate in the environment, both because it is intrinsically interesting and because it turns out that navigation—finding our way—is linked to the way we store m