Neural signals of location recall

Have you ever wondered how you know and remember routes that you’ve walked? Scientists have now tracked previously unrecorded brain signals associated with remembering locations.

A research team at Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum (RUB) used electroencephalography (EEG) to identify the underlined neuronal activity of the learning and remembering of specific locations.

The study, published in Current Biology, used data from ten epileptic patients to identify specific neural signals by implanting EEG electrodes in their brains as part of a surgical procedure. The patients were then monitored and asked to memorise paths through virtual houses and to remember those paths afterwards.

The results suggested that human brain navigation is particularly successful if other, irrelevant activities can be suppressed. The team also believes that there is more than one mechanism involved in the process.

“It is likely that there is more than one spatial navigation mechanism; rather, the brain uses different ‘codes’ to memorise locations,” said the leader of the research Professor Nikolai Axmacher.

The neurologists also found that the activity patterns observed during the learning and remembering of specific locations is similar.

Professor Axmacher said: “Distributed and local activity patterns appear to be related: the brain regions that contributed to distributed spatial representations also contained fairly precise information on a local scale.

“Just how important the question of the neuronal basis of spatial navigation is became apparent last year. All three Nobel Prizes in medicine were awarded to scientists who conducted research in this field.”

Paper: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)00013-5