It turns out that we remember the location of the car thanks to a special “communication line” between two parts of the brain. Violations in the work of this channel lead to problems with memory and orientation in space.
Researchers from the University of California (San Francisco, USA), whose article in the journal Cell, for the first time established that the brain uses a special circuit of neural connections between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus to navigate in a new space for itself. Thanks to this mechanism, we focus on the most visible details of the environment.
The prefrontal cortex, sometimes referred to as the “CEO of the brain,” controls higher executive functions such as attention, behavior planning, decision making, predicting the consequences of one’s actions, and so on. The hippocampus is part of the older, limbic system of the brain, which is responsible for memory and processing of spatial information, which is necessary for orientation in the environment.
As scientists have found in experiments on laboratory mice, when animals find themselves in a new place for themselves, an intense “dialogue” occurs between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, during which both parts of the brain exchange synchronized neural signals.
During this exchange, the researchers found, the hippocampus informs the prefrontal cortex about the location of various objects in the surrounding space, and that, in turn, instructs the hippocampus which of these objects to remember as landmarks.
«It’s like the prefrontal cortex has taken all the sensory information and said, ‘Hey hippocampus, we’re right here right now, so you should immediately pay attention to this and this.»», — Ruchi Malik, lead author of the study. She cited parking as an example: “To remember exactly where you parked, the prefrontal cortex tells the hippocampus to pay attention to certain landmarks. When you return, she will make him remember them and start looking for them.
As Malik and her colleagues suggest, disruption of this «dedicated line» between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus may underlie the problems with memory, attention and spatial orientation that are characteristic of dementia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and various mental disorders.