The brain part which creates mental maps of our environment plays a much bigger function in learning and memory than we earlier thought.
This is as per a new research published this week in the Nature journal by Princeton University researchers.
These researchers have discovered that those same brain areas are active when the brain is discovering a very different form of environment, one consisting listening to sounds.
They observed neural action as the rats listened and reacted to several sounds, and discovered same firing patterns to those seen when rats are exploring their environments.
Through giving the rats a different assignment, such as sound exploring, the researchers might observe proof of cognitive activities in the hippocampal-entorhinal circuit.
The rats learned that if they let go of the lever when the tone attained a predetermined frequency range, they would be awarded.
The discovery matches with how we think about mapping our environment in the situation of discovering new places and making memories of experiences. »
