|The hippocampus is a brain structure that is thought to have an
important role in memory, particularly spatial memory.
Recordings of single neurons in the hippocampus of rats as the
animals explore their environment find that a given hippocampal
neuron will tend to be active when the animal enters a
particular region of the environment. These cells are thus known
as place cells. It is thought that the activity of place cells
acts like a kind of neural "map", telling the animal where it
is. Acting in concert with place cells are head direction cells,
which seem to indicate which way the animal is facing. Recently,
a remarkable new class of neuron was discovered by the Moser lab
in Trondheim: these are known as the grid cells, and they may
function as a kind of metric (like a sheet of graph paper) for
the map to be built on.| My lab is interested in how place cells
work and what they are for. In humans, the hippocampus seems to
have an important role not only in spatial behaviour and
navigation, but also in me