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Fifty years of the brain’s sense of space

Neurons in a brain region called the hippocampus were found to be selectively active when rats are in a specific spatial location during natural navigation. The discovery launched research efforts into how the brain supports spatial memory.
  1. Isabel I. C. Low

    1. Isabel I. C. Low is in the Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

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  2. Lisa M. Giocomo

    1. Lisa M. Giocomo is in the Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

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Nearly all of our conscious experiences incorporate a sense of space: the restaurant where we ate, our route home, where we found our teacup, navigating to our favourite chair. This sense of space is how we know where we are, remember where we have been and plan where we want to go. But how the brain generates this sense and uses it for memory or navigation remained a mystery for many years. A landmark paper in 1971 by John O’Keefe and Jonathan Dostrovsky, published in Brain Research, offered the first glimpse into how neurons in the mammalian brain compute an animal’s sense of space1.

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Nature 599, 376-377 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03010-7

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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