When driving up to a busy intersection, you probably pay more attention to where you will be in the near future than where you are at that moment. Aft

A peek inside a flying bat's brain uncovers clues to mammalian navigation -- ScienceDaily

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2021-07-18 17:00:06

When driving up to a busy intersection, you probably pay more attention to where you will be in the near future than where you are at that moment. After all, knowing when you will arrive at the intersection -- and whether you need to stop or slow down to avoid a collision with a passing car, pedestrian or cyclist -- is usually much more important than knowing your current location.

This ability to focus on where we will be in the near future -- rather than where we are in the present -- may be a key characteristic of the mammalian brain's built-in navigation system, suggests a new study appearing online Thursday, July 8, in the journal Science.

Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, wirelessly tracked the brain activity of Egyptian fruit bats as they flew throughout a custom flight room. When the researchers compared the bats' flight paths with their neural readings, they found that the activities of the bats' "place cells" -- special type of neurons responsible for encoding an animal's spatial position -- were often more closely correlated with where the bats would be in the near future, rather than where they were in the moment.

"We wanted to find out: Does the neural activity at the present moment do a better job at representing a past or future position than it does the actual present position? And we found that, for some neurons, the neural activity actually does a much better job of representing a future position," said lead author Nicholas Dotson, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley. "The finding shows that neural activity in this region is representing more than the bat's present position -- it's tentatively representing a full flight trajectory."

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