UCI study improves understanding of brain's navigational system

The ability to successfully navigate in the environment is essential both for animals searching for food or escaping predators, as well as for human urban dwellers. It is something we take for granted, but under the hood, it is supported by still incompletely understood brain networks that continuously calculate our position in the environment. Moreover, the location where certain experience occurred is an indispensable building block of memory.

In the study, which appears in the September issue of the journal Neuron, the team led by Bruce McNaughton, UCI distinguished professor of neurobiology and behavior at the Ayala School of Biological Sciences, presents the findings that improve our understanding of the brain's ability to tell how fast and in which direction our location is changing.

"The parietal cortex is part of the brain that processes visual and other sensory information in order to continuously update the speed and direction of movement", said Dr. Ivan Skelin, co-first author of the study and postdoctoral researcher at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge and the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the Ayala School of Biological Sciences.

"In this study, we found that there is a division of work between large groups of cells, or modules, each being active when the experimental rat's speed/direction were in a certain range [e.g. 10-20 cm/sec and heading north-east]."

Based solely on the activity of these cell modules, researchers were able to predict animal speed and direction with high accuracy. The newly acquired knowledge of where and how this information is organized in the brain is a potentially useful guidance for the development of brain-machine interfaces, which are already helping paralyzed people interact with the environment using their thoughts.