Crystals of the brain

When we find our way in the environment, we need to integrate information about location, direction and distance into a coherent map-like representation. Our work over the last 10 years has suggested that the medial entorhinal cortex plays a central role in this process. A key component of the entorhinal network for spatial mapping is the grid cell, which we discovered, together with our colleagues, in 2005. Grid cells fire only when animals move through specific, regularly spaced positions. Their active firing positions form a hexagonal pattern that spans, for each cell, the entire local space available to the animal (Fig 1). The periodic pattern is reminiscent of the cross-points of graphic paper but the repeating units are equilateral triangles, not squares. Grid cells interact with other specialized cell types, such as head-direction cells and border cells. Head-direction cells signal orientationwhereas border cells fire only near the