The GPS in Our Brains

Humans are really good at navigation. It’s how we managed — over eons — to migrate across the world’s great landmasses and oceans. It has enabled us to to find our way around areas as vast as space, and to get from the bedroom to the bathroom and back again in the middle of the night. This innate ability is so natural we neither notice nor question it. But it has captured the attention of MCDB neuroscientist Sung Soo Kim, and in a new paper published in Nature, Kim zeroes in on the mechanism responsible for our reliable senses of direction, particularly in new and different environments.