Researchers documented the activity of neurons that shape directional navigation as bats explored a remote island off the coast of Tanzania.

On a remote island in the Indian Ocean, six closely watched bats took to the star-draped skies. As they flew across the seven-acre speck of land, devices implanted in their brains pinged data back to a group of sleepy-eyed neuroscientists monitoring them from below. The researchers were working to understand how these flying mammals, who have brains not unlike our own, develop a sense of direction while navigating a new environment.

The research, published in Science, reported that the bats used a network of brain cells(opens a new tab) that informed their sense of direction around the island. Their “internal compass” was tuned by neither the Earth’s magnetic field nor the stars in the sky, but rather by landmarks that informed a mental map of the animal’s environment.

These first-ever wild experiments in mammalian mapmaking confirm decades of lab results and support one of two competing theories about how an internal neural compass anchors itself to the environment.

“Now we’re understanding a basic principle about how the mammalian brain works” under natural, real-world conditions, said the behavioral neuroscientist Paul Dudchenko(opens a new tab), who studies spatial navigation at the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom and was not involved in the study. “It will be a paper people will be talking about for 50 years.”

...read more at quantamagazine.org