Researchers pinpointed brain’s GPS which helps to navigate among places

Researchers pinpointed brain’s GPS which helps to navigate among places

Through scanning some volunteers’ brains, while they watched video shot on the streets of Soho in central London, researchers pinpointed the navigation systems of the brain that helps
people to navigate from place A to place B. The brain scans conducted by the scientists revealed the mechanism of the brain’s GPS that underline our decisions as we follow the map towards a targeted destination.

After the study, the researchers found out that, as our internal global positioning system work together to steer us through the environment, two areas of the brain appear to take turns.
To meet the needs, these brain areas play different roles, one keeps track of the distance to the destination, and the other chips in to estimate the actual distance of the route ahead.

Hugo Spiers of Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience at University College London said, “We have never known anything about how the brain represents information about future places we
want to be. We didn’t know if the brain tried to keep track of the straight line distance to the goal and we got there by minimising that distance, or whether the brain used the actual path we planned to take.”

The volunteers were first given the maps of Soho by Spiers and his colleague Lorelei Howard to study. Then they took them on an exhaustive two-hour tour of the area in order to know how
the brain navigates.

During the tour, they asked the volunteers to learn the streets and locations of 23 bars, shops and cafes. The volunteers were then asked to sit in an exam to ensure they had learned the
area well after the training session.

In the next phase of the experiment, the scientists showed the participants a first-person shot footage, which they got via a film crew that walked around Soho in the early hours of a
summer morning to capture that video of the routes between various streets and establishments.

The volunteers laid in a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scanner, as they were shown the movies on a screen in front of them. During this session, the name of the street they
were on appeared alongside a picture of the bar or shop they had to get to.

Throughout the experiment, the scientists paused the video whenever a junction appeared and then asked the participants which way to turn. The subjects did not know that the video was
preset to follow the quickest route most of the time.

Spiers added, “Once people made a decision on which way to turn, the movie carried on. But if they pressed left, the movie didn’t always go left.”

The scans found that the front part of a brain structure, called the hippocampus, kept tabs on the straight line distance to a person’s destination and became more active the further away
they were.

Spiers explained, “If a bar is right nearby and you are getting further away, the activity in the front end of the hippocampus ramps up and up, and then goes back down as you get closer.”

But this tracking of the straight line distance was only one side of the coin. The back part of the hippocampus got involved when people made decisions about which way to turn and apparently
calculated the new route and its length.

The part of the rear hippocampus cleared when the participants were taken on an unanticipated deviation, away from their goal. The front part of the brain quickly responded calculating
the new way when the camera moved to make the wrong turn.

Eleanor Maguire of University College London talked about the importance of the back part of the hippocampus in route information in 2000. She scanned the brains of taxi drivers who had
memorised the streets of London and found the backs of their hippocampuses were larger than average.

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Posted by Zeeshan Gohar on Nov 17 2011. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry