How scientists investigate the brain’s internal navigation system

“Can you point to Center City?” neuroscientist Russell Epstein likes to ask visitors to his office at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Sometimes they can do it. Sometimes they have a little trouble. And sometimes, Epstein says, “they have no idea how they’d even begin to solve that problem.”

Epstein studies the way people navigate through space and orient to their surroundings–which turns out to be a very challenging problem for some people. His work builds on the research in rats that earned three scientists the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The prize-winning work identified certain types of neurons in the brain that are integral to the brain’s internal navigation system.

Epstein is one of several researchers trying to connect the dots between that rodent research and individual differences in people’s ability to orient to their surroundings and find their way from one place to another. As you may have noticed, all people are not equally good at this.

In a study, his lab teamed up with psychologists from nearby Temple University to investigate what happens as people get to know a new place over the course of a few weeks. They took Temple students to a suburban campus they’d never seen before and showed them two short walking routes that passed by four buildings that served as landmarks. To keep the students from making a connection between the two routes, they blindfolded them and pushed them in wheelchairs from one to the other.

Read full, original article: Beyond the Nobel: What Scientists Are Learning About How Your Brain Navigates

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