Cerebral cortexes are cool and all, but the "dumber" parts of the brain have a lot of good secrets in there too.
Lost fish find their way, thanks to their 'ancient brain'
Dec 2022, phys.org
They put tiny translucent zebrafish, barely half a centimeter in length, in a virtual reality environment that simulates water currents.
The researchers expected to see activation in the forebrain -- where the hippocampus, which contains a "cognitive map" of an animal's environment, is located. To their surprise, they saw activation in several regions of the medulla, where information about the animal's location was being transmitted from a newly identified circuit via a hindbrain structure called the inferior olive to the motor circuits in the cerebellum that enable the fish to move. When these pathways were blocked, the fish was unable to navigate back to its original location.These findings suggest that areas of the brainstem remember a zebrafish's original location and generate an error signal based on its current and past locations. This information is relayed to the cerebellum, allowing the fish to swim back to its starting point. This research reveals a new function for the inferior olive and the cerebellum, which were known to be involved in actions like reaching and locomotion, but not this type of navigation.
via Howard Hughes Medical Institute: Misha B. Ahrens, A brainstem integrator for self-location memory and positional homeostasis in zebrafish, Cell (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.11.022
Image credit: Homotopical Topology by Fomenko and Fuchs
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