I had a college friend who drove to visit me during the summer. He called from a pay phone (a land line phone that required a deposit of coins to make a call—for those who only know cell phones) to ask for directions. I said, “Tell me where you are, so I can meet you.”
He, not thinking anything about the significance of his question to those around him, asked, “Hey, can anyone tell me where I am?”
He was in Tom’s Bar.
We’ve evolved to know the importance of a “where” and how, when our brains are healthy, to keep track of our physical relationship to it. In our shared humanity, we can even tell others where they are. But with proliferating GPS technologies, we have become spoiled by navigation systems and computers and isolated from one another. Even our smart phones make us geographically lazy and isolated. Lose something? There’s an app somewhere that helps you find it. Lost in a city? Another app. Want to keep track of your car’s movements? After your first visit to concert venue, you can use your car’s navigation system to retrace your path to the hotel. It’s almost as though we don’t need our brains for anything other than obeying the navigation system’s instructions. But deep within our grey matter lie the secrets of place.
In 1971 John O’Keefe discovered place cells, and then in 2005 Edvard and May-Britt Moser discovered grid cells, all three sharing the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Now researchers Dun Mao, Steffen Kandler, Vincent Bonin, and Bruce McNaughton have added another piece to an as yet not complete puzzle of how we know where we are.* They have found that neurons in the resplenial cortex also play a role in spatial understanding. I suspect we’re not done yet. Surely, information from all the senses passes through some sort of neuronal detection and orientation system that involves different, if not all, parts of the brain.
Take smell, for example. Close your eyes and have someone drive you around town. The smell of bread? Probably passing the bakery. You don’t need to see it to know where you are. Or touch. Walk on sands. Most likely you’re on a beach—though there are, of course, other deposits of sands, such as kames, drumlins, and point bar deposits. Hearing? You don’t have to have open eyes to know when you are standing by a passing train or at the pool where kids are frolicking and splashing.
Seems that the whole brain is somehow wired to know place. So, for some this might be hard to believe, but your navigation system can fail, yet you don’t have to be lost. You have a brain designed to tell you where you are. And even if that seems to fail you, you can always do what people used to do before being isolated by technology. You can walk into a bar in a strange town and say, "Hey, where am I?”
Soon there might not be anyone--not even people on cell phones as they drink in a bar--that see either irony or humor in the question.
* https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-08-spatial-memorynew-brain-region-involved.html
He, not thinking anything about the significance of his question to those around him, asked, “Hey, can anyone tell me where I am?”
He was in Tom’s Bar.
We’ve evolved to know the importance of a “where” and how, when our brains are healthy, to keep track of our physical relationship to it. In our shared humanity, we can even tell others where they are. But with proliferating GPS technologies, we have become spoiled by navigation systems and computers and isolated from one another. Even our smart phones make us geographically lazy and isolated. Lose something? There’s an app somewhere that helps you find it. Lost in a city? Another app. Want to keep track of your car’s movements? After your first visit to concert venue, you can use your car’s navigation system to retrace your path to the hotel. It’s almost as though we don’t need our brains for anything other than obeying the navigation system’s instructions. But deep within our grey matter lie the secrets of place.
In 1971 John O’Keefe discovered place cells, and then in 2005 Edvard and May-Britt Moser discovered grid cells, all three sharing the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Now researchers Dun Mao, Steffen Kandler, Vincent Bonin, and Bruce McNaughton have added another piece to an as yet not complete puzzle of how we know where we are.* They have found that neurons in the resplenial cortex also play a role in spatial understanding. I suspect we’re not done yet. Surely, information from all the senses passes through some sort of neuronal detection and orientation system that involves different, if not all, parts of the brain.
Take smell, for example. Close your eyes and have someone drive you around town. The smell of bread? Probably passing the bakery. You don’t need to see it to know where you are. Or touch. Walk on sands. Most likely you’re on a beach—though there are, of course, other deposits of sands, such as kames, drumlins, and point bar deposits. Hearing? You don’t have to have open eyes to know when you are standing by a passing train or at the pool where kids are frolicking and splashing.
Seems that the whole brain is somehow wired to know place. So, for some this might be hard to believe, but your navigation system can fail, yet you don’t have to be lost. You have a brain designed to tell you where you are. And even if that seems to fail you, you can always do what people used to do before being isolated by technology. You can walk into a bar in a strange town and say, "Hey, where am I?”
Soon there might not be anyone--not even people on cell phones as they drink in a bar--that see either irony or humor in the question.
* https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-08-spatial-memorynew-brain-region-involved.html
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