Found, the brain cell that helps you locate your keys
eVer misplaced your car keys or mobile phone and had that nagging feeling in the back of your mind that you must know where they are?
Well you were right. Scientists have discovered that we have an inbuilt ability to recall where we left things.
While the existence of GPS-like brain cells, which can store maps of the places we have been, was widely known, the experts have found there is also a type of brain cell – vector trace cells – sensitive to the distance and direction of objects.
Damage to these cells may help explain memory loss in certain kinds of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease. One of the research team, Dr Steven Poulter, gave an example of how the cells work: ‘Vector trace cells help me remember where my daughter buried her seashells, i.e. three metres f r om my deckchair in t hat direction.’
Dr Poulter and Dr Colin Lever, from Durham University, led the research, which was co-directed by Dr Thomas Wills, from University College London, who said: ‘Storing distance and direction data in memory is essential for mental maps that can allow us to navigate to remembered goals, and vector trace cells are a likely candidate for how our brain achieves this.’
Dr Lever added: ‘It looks like vector trace cells connect to creative brain networks which help us to plan our actions and imagine complex scenarios in our mind’s eye. Vector trace cells acting together likely allow us to recreate the spatial relationships between ourselves and objects, and between the objects in a scene.’
Dr Poulter said: ‘The discovery of vector trace cells is particularly important as the area of the brain they are found in is one of the first to be attacked by brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, which could explain why a common symptom and key early “warning sign” in Alzheimer’s is the losing or misplacement of objects.’
Lord Winston, professor of science and society at Imperial College London, said: ‘This discovery gives a possible insight into certain kinds of dementia which are now of massive importance.
‘The idea that loss or change of such cells might be an early biomarker of disease could lead to earlier diagnosis and more effective therapies for one of the most intractable medical conditions.’