Cell: reveals the neural basis of animal instantaneous decision-making! Location cells in the brain switch back and forth between current path and possible future path in real time

February 8, 2020 / BIOON / - -- survival usually depends on the ability of animals to make decisions in an instant, which depends on the assumption of many future options: if an animal is chased by a hungry predator, will it turn left safely home or right to lead the predator away from his family? When the two paths are separated in the Yellow forest, which one will make it safe to eat food, and which one will make it a predator's plate of Chinese food? The two roads look almost the same, but the idea is to make everything different In a new study, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, found out how the brain might generate these scenarios in the future by studying rats walking in simple mazes This provides a new foundation not only for understanding how the brain makes decisions, but also for how this vision can work more broadly The related research results were published online in the cell Journal on January 30, 2020, under the title of "constant sub second cycling between representations of potential futures in the hippocampus" Picture from cell, 2020, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.01.014 "One of the most amazing capabilities of the brain is to imagine things that are not in front of it," said Dr Loren frank, a Ph.D associate with the paper and professor of physiology at the center for integrated neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco Imagination is the basis of decision-making, but so far, neuroscience has not explained how the brain can generate the future of imagination in real time to provide information for various daily decisions, while paying attention to reality " In the new study, frank and his team allowed rats to explore an m-maze and record the firing of neurons in the hippocampus called place cells Location cells have traditionally been thought to track the location of animals, much like the brain's GPS (Global Positioning System) But as the rats approached the fork in the maze, they found that their positional cell activity began to switch back and forth at a very fast rate of eight times per second between the current position representing the animal and its two alternative future pathways, as if to say, "shall I go left or right?" The Frank team also extended this finding to another type of scenario In addition to location, it is known that location cells can track the animal's direction of travel They found that cells that indicate the opposite direction of travel can also switch back and forth very quickly, as if to say, "I'm going this way, but I can also turn around and take another way." Dr Kenneth Kay, the first author of the paper and a graduate student of Frank laboratory, said, "the fast switching of these positional cells between the current path and the possible future path is accurate, because they are so regular It's exciting to see that speed plus consistency is exactly what's needed in any real environment, both for animals and for humans " Kay and his colleagues found that the oscillations of positional cells between the current path and the possible future path did not seem to directly control the decision-making of which path the rats chose, but increased as the rats approached the decision-making point This suggests that the role of the hippocampus in decision-making may be to create a "menu" of scenarios for the rest of the brain, which links the choices made to the value or potential danger of past experience, and then makes appropriate decisions based on the current state of the animal - hunger, thirst, fear or boldness "We think it shows that the hippocampus is not only responsible for recording the past and processing the present, but also for visualizing the future," Frank said This study is only the first step, but it opens up a new way for us to study how animals generate and evaluate scenarios in their brains when they make decisions " New research suggests that the hippocampus is the source of future scenarios The hippocampus is one of the most in-depth parts of the brain Damage to the hippocampus - whether due to brain damage or in diseases such as Alzheimer's disease - has deprived people of the ability to form new memories, leading 20th century scientists to describe the hippocampus as the brain's memory center In the 1970s, scientists discovered location cells in the hippocampus When animals explore new environments, these location cells will spontaneously create maps of new environments, and then store these maps for later use The discovery led scientists to realize that the hippocampus is also a navigation center, for example, responsible for getting animals back to where they remember eating those delicious blackberries last summer Along these lines, previous studies by Frank et al Have shown that positional cell activity can reproduce the animal's recent movement, and even predict where the animal might go next, but this activity is only observed intermittently, and it is believed that the animal is actively considering the next action, usually when the animal rests or pauses during the movement (nature, 2016, doi:10.1126/nature17144）。 This new study is the first to show how hippocampal cells consistently and systematically represent different scenarios over time Such a system could allow animals in action to make extremely quick decisions based on the different scenarios they envision, while also tracking their current situation, the researchers said It may even play a role in the brain's ability to generate hypothetical scenarios or ideas more broadly "This regular switch between the present and the possible future (or reality and vision) looks like a powerful system that generates a lot of ideas, not just mechanical memory or prediction," Kay said The hippocampus may be the source of our imagination " (BIOON Com) reference: 1 Kenneth Kay et al Constant sub second cycling between representations of potential futures in the hippocampus Cell, 2020, doi:10.1016/j.cell.2020.01.014 2.Brain's 'GPS system' toggles between present and possible future paths in real time https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-01-brain-gps-toggles-future-paths.html