A SWANSEA academic has helped find a new type of brain cell which helps us find our way around, even in unfamiliar territory.
Christoph Weidemann played a role in identifying grid cells, which help our grey matter keep track of navigational clues, such as how far you are from a starting point or your last turn.
The team concluded that without grid cells it is likely that humans would frequently get lost or have to navigate based solely on landmarks.
Grid cells have been discovered in rats, and researchers three years ago suggested their existence in humans. But Dr Weidemann and his peers said theirs was the first positive indication of the cells in people. They added the cells were not only found in the brain's entorhinal cortex, where they are observed in rats, but also in a very different brain area — the cingulate cortex.
The entorhinal cortex is a part of the brain studied in Alzheimer's disease research, and understanding grid cells could help researchers understand why people with the disease often get lost.
The team located the grid cells when studying brain recordings of epilepsy patients with electrodes implanted deep inside their brains as part of their treatment. During recording, the 14 patients played a navigation video game that challenged them to walk from one point to another to retrieve objects and then recall how to get back to the places each object came from.
The team studied the relation between how patients navigated in the video game and the activity of individual neurons. Dr Weidemann, of the university's College of Human and Health Sciences, said it was reasonable to assume millions of the brain's neurons exhibit grid-like firing properties.
He added: "The study of neurosurgery patients offers unique insights into neural activity supporting spatial navigation. By recording from electrodes implanted in the brains of our participants, we were able to directly observe the neural code that is thought to underlie spatial memory in humans."
