A team of neuroscientists led by Dr. Andrea Burgalossi of the Tübingen Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN) at the University of Tübingen have taken an important step towards understanding the ‘inner compass’. Investigating so-called head direction cells (HD cells) in the rodent brain, they were able to find evidence of networks that had been purely theoretical for more than a decade: HD cells are directly linked with different types of brain structures that control navigation. Most intriguingly, they forward information to areas known to contain grid cells – a cell type considered very important in keeping track of one’s position in one’s surroundings, much like a GPS system.
↧