In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration

by Shane O'Mara

Here at last we are now starting to assemble the elements of a proper cognitive map in the brain. Place cells code for where you are in your environment; and head-direction cells code for your orientation in that environment. In other words, there are two populations of brain cells that are directly involved in knowing where you are and where you are going. Beyond that, since the early 2000s a staggering range of cells throughout what might be referred to as the extended hippocampal formation system have been described. In the entorhinal cortex, for example, the Norwegian researchers Edvard Moser and May Britt Moser discovered cells which have become known as ‘grid’ cells. These answer the long-standing question of how the brain knows the dimensions of space at all: at least over short distances, entorhinal cortex grid cells appear to provide a metric that the brain uses to code for distance. O’