2007/02/18
grid cells and 2D position coding
This is fascinating. Most things that sound fascinating at first really are pretty boring, but this is a notable exception in quite a few years.
First there was a seminar (which I missed) with this kind of description
How grid cell neurons encode rat position
Recently it was discovered that neurons in an area of the cortex (called dMEC) of rats, fire on every vertex of a regular triangular lattice that tiles 2-d space. These so-called “grid cells” efficiently encode rat position in a system that can be shown is analogous to a residue number system (RNS). By interpreting measured dMEC properties within an RNS framework, we can estimate the amount of position information stored within dMEC, and show how an RNS-like scheme is particularly well-suited to store and update positional information.
That tipped me off to this really amazing paper:
Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex by Hafting, Fyhn, Molden, Moser, and Moser.
(Read the article)
Comments(1)