Spatial orientation: scientists discover the brain's compass _ spatial orientation examples- spatial orientation phenomenon -spatial orientation activities

 Orientación espacial: los científicos, descubren la, ‘brújula’ del ,cerebro

Neuroscientists Edvard Moser, May-Britt Moser, and John O'Keefe were awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering the cells that allow us to locate ourselves; that is, for his work on the spatial perception of the brain.

These cells, called network cells, are found in the entorhinal cortex of the brain and act like a GPS, like an internal coordinate system that allows us to know our position in space. In other words, we are born with an internal navigation system.

Now, a team of researchers from MIT's McGovern Institute has demonstrated the existence in the brain of what could be called an abstract compass: a one-dimensional ring that represents the direction of the head relative to the outside world.

The study's lead author, Ila Fiete, who is also a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, explained that "In the absence of this ring, we would be lost in the world."

The research, which has been carried out with mice, shows how the brain represents the complex world in simple ways or, in other words, has identified a brain circuit that extracts complex information about the environment transforming it into a simple abstract object in the brain. To conduct the study, they used so-called topological modeling (a system for finding a pattern), which allowed them to transform the activity of large populations of noisy neurons into a ring-shaped data cloud. They measured hours of neuronal activity from dozens of neurons in the anterodorsal thalamic nucleus - a region believed to play a role in spatial navigation - as the animals moved freely through their environment. And they mapped how neurons fired when the animals' heads changed direction. Together these data points formed a cloud in the shape of a simple and persistent ring. Further analysis revealed that this ring acts as an attractor: if neurons deviate from the path, they return to it, quickly correcting the system. This attractive property of the ring means that the representation of the head's direction in abstract space is reliably stable over time, a key requirement if we want to understand and maintain a stable sense of where our head is in relation to the world around us. surrounds. Fiete's work offers a first glimpse of how complex sensory information is distilled into a simple concept in the mind, and how that representation autonomously corrects errors, making it exquisitely stable.