A special mechanism of brain activity helps people navigate in space, and its exact localization is determined by experts from Germany and England. A similar “internal compass” was previously discovered in rodents.
Nerve cells in the brain are responsible for navigation, that is, understanding how to move from one point to another. It is also not easy to measure neural activity during movement in humans because current methods essentially require the person to remain as still as possible.
Researchers from the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom and Ludwig and Maximilian University in Germany solved this problem using mobile electroencephalography devices and motion capture technology, a method that allows you to digitize the movement of an object and create animated three-dimensional animations. dimensional models. Experts studied what and in what part of the brain occurs when a person needs to perform an action related to spatial orientation. The journal published the results of its studies Nature Human Behavior.
Scientists have discovered a nerve signal that comes before turning the head or moving the gaze in the desired direction. According to the scientific article, its source is the temporal lobe of the brain. At the same time, the strongest signal was in the middle temporal lobe. A similar mechanism was previously discovered in birds, rats and bats.
A series of experiments with the participation of 62 adults, including 52 healthy people and 10 patients with epilepsy, made it possible to determine exactly where the “internal nervous compass” is located. They were asked to perform tasks that required them to turn their head or direct their gaze in the desired direction. Brain activity was recorded using caps with EEG sensors that measure signals from the scalp, as well as intracranial electroencephalography.
“Isolating these signals allows us to really focus on how the brain processes navigation information and how these signals interact with other signals, such as visual cues. Our approach has opened up new opportunities to study these features, which could be important in the study of neurodegenerative diseases and even in the development of navigation technologies in robotics and artificial intelligence .” The study authors noted.
Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases are among the neurodegenerative diseases whose investigation can yield useful results. Because of them, navigation and orientation in space are often violated.
In the future, researchers plan to focus on how the human brain orients itself over time. They hope the results on the “internal compass” will help understand whether similar neural activity is responsible for memory.
Source: Port Altele
