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Researchers discover workings of brain's 'GPS system'
Date:3/7/2013

Just as a global positioning system (GPS) helps find your location, the brain has an internal system for helping determine the body's location as it moves through its surroundings.

A new study from researchers at Princeton University provides evidence for how the brain performs this feat. The study, published in the journal Nature, indicates that certain position-tracking neurons called grid cells ramp their activity up and down by working together in a collective way to determine location, rather than each cell acting on its own as was proposed by a competing theory.

Grid cells are neurons that become electrically active, or "fire," as animals travel in an environment. First discovered in the mid-2000s, each cell fires when the body moves to specific locations, for example in a room. Amazingly, these locations are arranged in a hexagonal pattern like spaces on a Chinese checker board.

"Together, the grid cells form a representation of space," said David Tank, Princeton's Henry L. Hillman Professor in Molecular Biology and leader of the study. "Our research focused on the mechanisms at work in the neural system that forms these hexagonal patterns," he said. The first author on the paper was graduate student Cristina Domnisoru, who conducted the experiments together with postdoctoral researcher Amina Kinkhabwala.

Domnisoru measured the electrical signals inside individual grid cells in mouse brains while the animals traversed a computer-generated virtual environment, developed previously in the Tank lab. The animals moved on a mouse-sized treadmill while watching a video screen in a set-up that is similar to video-game virtual reality systems used by humans.

She found that the cell's electrical activity, measured as the difference in voltage between the inside and outside of the cell, started low and then ramped up, growing larger as the mouse reached each point on the hexagonal grid and then falling
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Contact: Catherine Zandonella
czandone@princeton.edu
Princeton University
Source:Eurekalert  

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