The brain records our experiences about space and memory, enabling us to make fast decisions. Spatial cognition is represented by "place cells" and "grid cells" in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex (located on the side of the brain). Individual neurons function as "memory-trace cells" that track spatial memory. Diseases like Alzheimer's may cause memory deficits by disrupting the activity of location cells.
To test how spatial location is coded in the brain, surgeons hooked implanted electrodes to neurons in neurosurgical patients. The patients were asked to remember locations in a virtual-reality (VR) environment. The "memory-trace cells" tuned their activity to a particular place. Acting like a GPS, the neurons recorded and memorized the position in space. The activity of these neurons unmistakably identified the location.
In the brain, place cells and grid cells in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex are one of the first regions affected by the onset of Alzheimer's disease. A recent study has found that these memory-specific individual neurons function as a kind of GPS. Memory-trace cells in the entorhinal cortex encode memory representations through a memory-specific rate code. These findings indicate that single neurons in the human entorhinal cortex change their spatial tuning to target relevant memories for retrieval.
Flexibility to change might improve our resilience to the disease.
Read the original article in Nature Neuroscience by Qasim and colleagues.
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