Nature draws the goal in mind

Animals, including rodents and humans, can rely on the cognitive map inside the brain to navigate to the desired location
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Although previous research has identified special neurons that help us determine our own position and direction in space, whether the brain can process accurate estimates of future target positions has always been a long-standing problem

An internal compass

In order to complete simple daily chores, such as planning to go to the local supermarket, you need to imagine what the supermarket looks like when you are still at home, so that your brain can calculate the best route for the upcoming journey
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But how can the spatial map of the brain represent two locations in space at the same time—a home that most of your senses can perceive and a supermarket that is beyond the range of your senses? Neuroscientists have been working on it for the past 50 years.
Try to solve this problem

"Since Nobel Prize winner John O'Keefe and his colleagues discovered location cells in 1971, spatial navigation research has focused on the characteristics of neurons that regulate the instantaneous position or orientation of animals," said Hiroshi Ito and Max Planck The head of the research team of the Brain Institute, he led the new research published in the journal Nature
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Research over the past few decades has given us a better understanding of how to track our position and direction in space

"Our current work solves this problem and shows that the future goal behaves as a pattern of neural activity, similar to the pattern of previous visits to the target location (such as a supermarket)
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For example, when an animal visits a specific location in space, it will observe A specific neural activity pattern

"We designed a task in which the mouse needs to navigate to a remote place where the reward will be provided
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It is worth noting that the position of the reward is constantly changing, which ensures that the mouse constantly updates its target position," Raunak Basu, a postdoctoral fellow in the Ito lab and the first author of the new study, explained

Decipher the neural code of future goals

To study the neural patterns of OFC, the researchers measured the activity of hundreds of neurons at the same time
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"We achieved this by using a custom-made 3D printing recording device that can insert up to 60 ultra-thin wires (tetrodes) into the brains of mice

Perturbation of OFC neurons can cause navigation errors

Motivated by this discovery, Basu and colleagues asked a question: Does the activity of OFC neurons have a causal effect on the animal’s destination? For this reason, they used pulsed lasers at the beginning of the journey to disrupt the neuronal activity in OFC.
Activity
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Basu recalled: "What surprised me the most was that this mouse, which completed the navigation task almost perfectly, was suddenly disturbed, unknowingly walked past a correct target, and went to a wrong position

"Our work is directed to a parallel internal map system in the brain, which is more focused on representing a destination rather than the short-lived places that animals pass through during navigation
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Therefore, it is interesting that the brain uses multiple map systems, Not only track the current state of the self, but also track the future state of the self.