Neuroscience in the Wild

Natural behaviors are performed outdoors – in the real world. Our most recent adventure is to take Neuroscience into the Wild – and to ask: What are the neural bases of navigation and other natural behaviors outdoors, in the real world? To this end, we record place-cells and head-direction cells in bats navigating outdoors on a remote oceanic island in Tanzania – off the coast of Zanzibar.

Our discoveries include

• We performed the first single-unit neural recordings in any mammalian species and any brain region during outdoor behavior – specifically, in bats navigating outdoors on a remote oceanic island. We discovered that head-direction cells exist outdoors, and stably encode the animal's orientation across the entire island, irrespective of the dynamics of the moon and stars – thus, head-direction cells can serve as a reliable neural compass for real-world navigation.
• More – soon…