Apr. 18,
2013 — Animals navigate and orient themselves to survive -- to find food
and shelter or avoid predators, for example. Research conducted by Dr. Nachum
Ulanovsky and research student Michael Yartsev of the Weizmann Institute's
Neurobiology Department, published today in Science, reveals for the first time
how three-dimensional, volumetric, space is perceived in mammalian brains. The
research was conducted using a unique, miniaturized neural-telemetry system
developed especially for this task, which enabled the measurement of single
brain cells during flight.
The question
of how animals orient themselves in space has been extensively studied, but
until now experiments were only conducted in two-dimensional settings. These
have found, for instance, that orientation relies on "place cells" --
neurons located in the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in memory,
especially spatial memory. Each place cell is responsible for a spatial area,
and it sends an electrical signal when the animal is located in that area.
Together, the place cells produce full representations of whole spatial
environments. Unlike the laboratory experiments, however, the navigation of
many animals in the real world, including humans, is carried out in three
dimensions. But attempts to expand the scope of experiments from two to three
dimensions had encountered difficulties.
One of the
more famous efforts in this area was conducted by the University of Arizona
and NASA, in which they launched rats into space (aboard a space shuttle).
However, although the rats moved around in zero gravity, they ran along a set
of straight, one-dimensional lines. Other experiments with three-dimensional
projections onto two-dimensional surfaces did not manage to produce volumetric
data, either. The conclusion was that in order to understand movement in
three-dimensional, volumetric space, it is necessary to allow animals to move
through all three dimensions -- that is, to research animals in flight.
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