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The compass within

Nature Neuroscience volume 18, pages 482–483 (2015)Cite this article

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Head direction cells have been hypothesized to form representations of an animal's spatial orientation through internal network interactions. New data from mice show the predicted signatures of these internal dynamics.

Have you ever stepped out of the elevator in an office building or hotel and turned down the hallway only to realize that you had turned the wrong way and were headed in the wrong direction? In that moment when something didn't seem right, did the world seem to spin around you as you reoriented to your intended heading? This internal sense of orientation occurs because there are cells in several brain areas that maintain a cognitive representation of your heading. These so-called head direction cells, along with other cells that represent particular locations in an environment, make it possible to know where we are and how to get where we are going. Head direction cells have been hypothesized to maintain a representation of orientation through internal network dynamics, and in an elegant study examining head direction ensembles in mice, Peyrache et al.1 directly reveal these internal network dynamics.

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Figure 1: The attractor-network model of the head direction system produces a coherent head direction representation even in the absence of external inputs.

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  1. Nathan W. Schultheiss & A. David Redish are in the Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.,

    Nathan W Schultheiss & A David Redish

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  1. Nathan W Schultheiss
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  2. A David Redish
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Correspondence to Nathan W Schultheiss or A David Redish.

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Schultheiss, N., Redish, A. The compass within. Nat Neurosci 18, 482–483 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3977

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