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Neuroscience

The inside story on place cells

Nature volume 461, pages 889–890 (2009)Cite this article

Neurons known as place cells encode spatial information that is needed to guide an animal's movement. Nearly 40 years after these cells were discovered, neuroscience gets a look at their internal dynamics.

On page 941 of this issue, Harvey et al.1 describe a novel combination of techniques that they have used to address unresolved questions about brain function. The experiments involve mice navigating within a virtual-reality setting while intracellular electrophysiological recordings are made of particular neurons — pyramidal neurons — in the hippocampus. The ability to gather such data adds greatly to the information that can be gleaned from the accompanying extracellular recordings.

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Figure 1: Mouse navigation in virtual reality.

F. COLLMAN

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Douglas Nitz is in the Department of Cognitive Science, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA. dnitz@ucsd.edu,

    Douglas Nitz

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  1. Douglas Nitz
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Nitz, D. The inside story on place cells. Nature 461, 889–890 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/461889a

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