Grid cells and time, Boole, How your brain shapes your life

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 5 November 2015

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

Grid cells and time Animals navigate by calculating their current position based on how long and how far they have travelled and a new study on treadmill-running rats reveals how this happens. Neurons called grid cells collate the information about time and distance to support memory and spatial navigation, even in the absence of visual landmarks. New research by Howard Eichenbaum at Boston University has managed to separate the space and time aspects in these cells challenging currently held views of the role of grid cells in the brain.

Boole It's the 200th anniversary of the birth of George Boole. We speak to Professor Des MacHale, his biographer at Cork University, and Dr Mark Hocknull, historian of science at University of Lincoln, where he was born, to uncover Boole's unlikely rise to Professor of Mathematics, given his lack of formal academic training. We discuss the impact of his work at the time, and his legacy for the modern digital age.

How your brain shapes your life It weighs 3lbs, takes 25 years to reach maturity and, unique to bits of our bodies, damage to your brain is likely to change who you are. Neuroscientist David Eagleman's new book, The Brain: The Story of You, explores the field of brain research. New technology is providing a flood of data. But what we don't have, according to Eagleman, is the theoretical scaffolding on which to hang this. Why do brains sleep and dream? What is intelligence? What is consciousness?

Producer: Fiona Roberts.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello you downloaded BBC Radio 4's Inside Science first broadcast on Thursday the 5th of
0:05.8	November and I'm Tracy Logan for terms and conditions visit BBC.co. UK.
0:10.4	forward slash radio 4 and a warning this program contains scenes of an historical nature. Hello today we're dancing at the leading edge of neuroscience where timing is everything.
0:27.0	Two-stepping through the yes-no logic of a 19th century cobbler's son
0:31.5	and understanding why teenagers cringe so easily in
0:35.0	social situations.
0:38.2	We took a shop window where there's a lot of pedestrian traffic and we put volunteers in the
0:46.7	window in a seat with a big blinking sign that said look at me and then we measured
0:52.1	what was going on with them physiologically and turns out if you put an
0:56.0	adult in that situation where people walk by and stare and gawk at them through the window,
1:00.5	adults find it a little uncomfortable but sort of interesting, but you put a teenager
1:05.3	there and their physiology just goes nuts.
1:08.3	Poor loves!
1:10.3	Now, hang on a minute.
1:12.3	This time last week I was here in the inside science studio, but where did I go after and how long did the journey take?
1:20.0	Oh, get a grip, Tracy. This week new insights into how we remember the timing of events.
1:26.8	Building on earlier research, the discoveries of brain cells that register spatial information,
1:31.8	the location of people and things that won last
1:34.6	year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Now writing in the journal
1:38.7	Neuron, scientists have gone a step further. So we've discovered that the same cells that encode and
1:45.2	signal our sense of space also signal our sense of time. So time and space seem to
1:50.0	be integrated with one another. That's Professor Howard Eichenbaum of Boston University whose discovery is helping to explain
	...

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