GPS cerebral en humanos



Al parecer, el cerebro humano posee células especializadas en la orientación espacial, identificadas en otros mamíferos. El asunto es muy importante por sus repercusiones. La información procede de Nature Neuroscience y ha recibido la atención del NYT.

J oshua Jacobs of Drexel University in Philadelphia and a team of scientists including Michael J. Kahana at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Itzhak Fried at U.C.L.A. and Tel-Aviv University, reported in Nature Neuroscience on Sunday that signals from electrodes implanted in human patients with severe epilepsy proved the presence of grid cells that function in the same way as those found in other mammals.
“It completes the picture,” said Edvard I. Moser of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, one of the discoverers of grid cells. “It’s a significant contribution.”
Dr. Jacobs said the research was important to do because, although it had seemed likely that grid cells existed in human beings, it was far from certain.
“It’s not at all clear that humans and rodents behave in the same manner,” he said.
An area of the brain where grid cells are found in rats, and now in humans, the entorhinal cortex, is often damaged in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, so knowing how the navigation system works is important, Dr. Jacobs said. The scientists also located grid cells in another brain area in humans, the cingulate cortex, where, Dr. Jacobs said, they have not been found in rats.