Place cells

4 articles
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    The Brain Cells That Guide Animals

    Virtual-reality experiments on fruit flies offer insight into how the brains of mammals, like us, might build maps of their world.Photograph by Tanya Wolff It may seem absurd to compare a tiny fruit fly’s brain to that of a majestic elephant. Yet it is the dream of many neuroscientists to find deep rules that very […]
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    New Evidence for the Strange Geometry of Thought

    The brain may represent concepts in the same way that it represents space and your location, by using the same neural circuitry for the brain’s “inner GPS.”Sharon Mollerus / M.C. Escher / Flickr In 2014, the Swedish philosopher and cognitive scientist Peter Gärdenfors went to Krakow, Poland, for a conference on the mind. He was […]
  • Rajagopalan_HERO

    The Surprising Relativism of the Brain’s GPS

    How new data is transforming our understanding of place cells.
  • Costandi_HERO

    Emotional Renovations

    How your brain twists together emotion and place.