Decoding the Hippocampus
Neuroscientists are trying to figure out how different parts of the hippocampus are responsible for identifying previously visited places. Quoting from the Science summary, “Where am I?” by André A. Fenton:
The collective discharging of place cells allows us to predict the rat’s location by, in a sense, reading its mind. Knowing a rat’s location from the activity of its neurons is astonishing given that rats, like people, have no specific spatial sense organs analogous to, for example, the visual or auditory systems. Somehow spatial knowledge is assembled by the brain.
This is interesting to me because there’s a lot of work being done on analyzing deformations in the hippocampus to distinguish between Alzheimer’s and normal dementia. Being able to distinguish between the two in a blind setting is extremely valuable.