Finding the Way

It’s easy to get lost somewhere new, but have you ever struggled for a moment to place yourself even somewhere familiar? Disorientation is common in people with damage to a particular part of the brain – the retrosplenial cortex (pictured, from a mouse) – but we don’t know how it commands our sense of space. To investigate, researchers examined neurons unique to this area of the brain (white), and found that inputs from other brain regions (blue and pink) involved in positioning communicated preferentially with them. These specialised neurons interpret spatial signals to help the mice determine the position and movement of their heads, suggesting they would be well equipped to deal with other spatial information. It's one of the first brain regions to show altered activity in people with Alzheimer’s disease, who often show similar disorientation to those with brain damage, so investigating these key neurons could lead to new ways forward.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Ellen KW Brennan, Izabela Jedrasiak-Cape and Sameer Kailasa, and colleagues
• Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, June 2021