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04 November 2021

Fifty years of the brain’s sense of space

Neurons in a brain region called the hippocampus were found to be selectively active when rats are in a specific spatial location during natural navigation. The discovery launched research efforts into how the brain supports spatial memory.

Isabel I. C. Low
⁰
&
Lisa M. Giocomo
¹

Isabel I. C. Low
1. Isabel I. C. Low is in the Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
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Lisa M. Giocomo
1. Lisa M. Giocomo is in the Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
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Nearly all of our conscious experiences incorporate a sense of space: the restaurant where we ate, our route home, where we found our teacup, navigating to our favourite chair. This sense of space is how we know where we are, remember where we have been and plan where we want to go. But how the brain generates this sense and uses it for memory or navigation remained a mystery for many years. A landmark paper in 1971 by John O’Keefe and Jonathan Dostrovsky, published in Brain Research, offered the first glimpse into how neurons in the mammalian brain compute an animal’s sense of space¹.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03010-7

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Subjects

Research Associate / PhD Student (m/f/x)

Technische Universität Dresden (TU Dresden)

01069 Dresden, Germany
wiss. Mitarbeiter/in (m/w/d)

Technische Universität Dresden (TU Dresden)

01069 Dresden, Germany
Research Associate / Postdoc (m/f/x)

Technische Universität Dresden (TU Dresden)

01069 Dresden, Germany
Lecturer in Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering

The University of Sheffield

Sheffield, United Kingdom

This article was originally published by Nature.com. Read the original article here.

Fifty years of the brain’s sense of space

Fifty years of the brain’s sense of space

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wiss. Mitarbeiter/in (m/w/d)

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Lecturer in Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering

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