{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Knowledge Architects: Building Wisdom in the Information Age","title":"Episode 29 | The Brain's Inner GPS","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1460,"description":"Episode Summary\n\nRight now, without looking, you know where the door is. You could cross your home in total darkness and count the steps to the kitchen. That is because, at this very moment, cells deep in your brain are firing to announce your location, drawing a live map of the room around you. And here is the twist this episode ends on: those very same cells may be drawing a map of your ideas.\nIn this episode we follow a fifty year detective story. It runs from a rebel psychologist who insisted in 1948 that rats carry an inner \"cognitive map\", to the discovery of place cells in 1971, to the beautiful hexagonal grid cells of 2005, to the 2014 Nobel Prize that crowned the brain's \"inner GPS\". Then we push to the frontier, where the same navigation circuitry appears to organize sound, abstract concepts, and even the people we meet. The question we leave you with is simple and strange: do we think by navigating?\n\nKey Topics Covered\n\nTolman's 1948 idea of the \"cognitive map\" and latent learning: a heresy in the age of behaviorismJohn O'Keefe and Jonathan Dostrovsky discover place cells in the rat hippocampus (1971), from only about eight cellsThe shock of finding a spatial signal inside the brain's \"memory\" structureO'Keefe and Nadel's cognitive map theory (1978): allocentric maps and remappingMay-Britt and Edvard Moser discover grid cells in the entorhinal cortex (2005) and their hexagonal latticeThe grid is generated internally: the floor is blank, the honeycomb lives only in the firing patternGrid modules at different scales for an efficient positioning codeThe full \"cell zoo\": cells for head direction, boundaries, speed, combinations, and timeThe 2014 Nobel Prize and the \"inner GPS\" metaphorWhy it is really path integration (dead reckoning) corrected by landmarks, not satellitesHuman place cells and grid cells found through video game navigation in epilepsy patientsThe sixfold fMRI signature: a proxy for grid cells, not a direct recordingThe Alzheimer's...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/FqjMDaQUSm1bYfkwwD6aDUnSGdwLjCiheWhxBb00zow/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS84YjIz/YzkwMzlmNGM5YmEw/NTJkOGYyMTk0YTMw/ZWM0Zi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}