Neuroscientists reveal "neural compass" that stops you from getting lost

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We humans are pretty good at navigating—we can find our way home, remember walks in our favorite cities and parks or navigate through confusing office blocks. But what happens in our brains when we use this internal compass?

The navigational abilities of various animals have been extensively studied, but much less is known about our own "neural compass." However, understanding this neural network could have important implications for our understanding of diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, in which navigation and orientation are often impaired.

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"Keeping track of the direction you are heading in is pretty important," Benjamin Griffiths, a research fellow at the U.K.'s University of Birmingham, said in a statement.

"Even small errors in estimating where you are and which direction you are heading in can be disastrous," he continued. "We know that animals such as birds, rats and bats have neural circuitry that keeps them on track, but we know surprisingly little about how the human brain manages this out and about in the real world."

An artist's impression depicts neurons in the brain. Understanding how these cells help us navigate could provide new insights into what goes wrong in diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Nathan Devery/Getty

In a new study, published in the online journal Nature Human Behavior, Griffiths and his colleagues at the University of Birmingham and Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University set about studying this human neural compass by conducting a series of motion-tracking experiments.

The study involved 52 healthy participants who were asked to move their heads to orient themselves to cues on different computer monitors while wearing an EEG scalp monitor to track their brain activity.

In a separate experiment, the researchers recruited 10 volunteers who were already undergoing intracranial electrode monitoring for conditions like epilepsy. Again, the participants were asked to move their heads, or sometimes just their eyes, while their brain signals were monitored.

After accounting for any confounding factors, such as muscle movement, the team was able to pinpoint a finely tuned directional signal that appeared just before physical changes in head direction among the participants. The researchers believe this signals an internal "neural compass" that the brain uses to orient itself in space and navigate through an environment.

"Isolating these signals enables us to really focus on how the brain processes navigational information and how these signals work alongside other cues such as visual landmarks," Griffiths said.

"Our approach has opened up new avenues for exploring these features, with implications for research into neurodegenerative diseases and even for improving navigational technologies in robotics and AI," he said.

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