The brain's zoom button
Lisa Giocomo and her colleagues at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience have discovered a key mechanism that can act like a zoom button in the brain, by controlling the resolution of the brain's internal maps.
In the November 16 edition of Cell, the researchers describe the effect of knocking out HCN1 ion channels in the grid cells of the brain.
Changing the brain's resolution
When the researchers knocked out the ion channels, they found that the resolution of the maps created by the brain became coarser, in that the area covered by each grid cell was larger.
“If grid cells are similar to a longitude and latitude coordinate system, what determines the distance between the coordinate points of this internal map?” Giocomo asks. “When we knocked out the HCN1 ion channel, the scale of the innate coordinate system increased. It's like losing longitude and latitude lines on a map. Suddenly you can't represent a spatial environment at a very fine scale.”
