Brain Odometer: How Your Movement Tracks Your Brain
- Have you ever wondered how you just seem to know how far you have to go to your destination?
- Andrews located the "mileage clock" inside the brain after recording the brain activity of rats running in a square around the perimeter of thier cage.
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The Brain’s Internal “Mileage Clock” and How We Sense Distance
Have you ever wondered how you just seem to know how far you have to go to your destination? Or maybe you were on a road trip and thought to yourself, “only about 275 miles to go,” only to pass a sign that lists your destination as 272 miles away. Well,it turns out there’s a reason for these occurrences and also for why you inherently remember how to get somewhere.
scientists at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews located the “mileage clock” inside the brain after recording the brain activity of rats running in a square around the perimeter of thier cage. This allowed them to find the part of the brain responsible for this vrey important task. When the scientists changed up the rats path, that sense failed them and they wandered around lost and confused.
The brains of the rats behaved like an odometer, ticking off the steps and miles. When the researchers put people in a similar situation, they behaved exactly like the rats, suggesting humans have this same feature in their brains, the study, published by