The Brain’s Inner GPS Gets Dismantled

In a recent study published in the journal Cell Reports, researchers were able to derive clues about why strokes and Alzheimer’s disease can destroy a person’s sense of direction. Grid cells and other specialized nerve cells in the brain, known as “place cells,” comprise the brain’s inner GPS. Building on previous Nobel-prize winning science, researchers from UC San Diego developed a micro-surgical procedure that makes it possible to remove the area of a rat’s brain that contains grid cells in order to show what happens to this hard-wired navigational system when these grid cells are wiped out. As a result, the rats become very poor at tasks requiring internal map-making skills, such as remembering the location of a resting platform in a water-maze test. “Their loss of spatial memory formation was not a surprise,” said the lead author of the study. “It’s what would be expected based on the physiological characteristics of that area of the brain.” This part of the brain is known as the entorhinal cortex and is the first brain region to break down in Alzheimer’s disease. However, the rats retained a host of other memory and navigation-related skills that scientists had previously speculated would be destroyed without grid cells. To read more about this study, click here.