Complexity Digest 2006.19 - 05

8-May-2006

New Web Cast :

6th Understanding Complex Systems Symposium

Urbana-Champaign, Il, 06/05/15-18
http://complexity.vub.ac.be/~comdig/06UCS/

The Map In The Brain: Grid Cells May Help Us Navigate, Science Bookmark and Share

Excerpts: A newfound class of neurons enables the brain to perform complex spatial navigation--and may even help form memories

(...) Moser and his colleagues, including his wife May-Britt Moser and postdoctoral researchers Torkel Hafting and Marianne Fyhn, let rats roam freely in large enclosures while recording the firing of individual neurons from this cortical region. The neurons fired at distinct places: If plotted on a map of the enclosure, the firing locations of each neuron formed a triangular grid. "It's a lattice that's repeated over and over again," says Edvard Moser. Consequently, he and his team at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim have dubbed these previously unknown neurons "grid cells."