the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

After wandering around an unfamiliar part of town, can you sense which direction to travel to get back to the subway or your car? If so, you can thank your entorhinal cortex, a brain area recently identified as being responsible for our sense of direction. Variation in the signals in this area might even explain why some people are better navigators than others.

The new work adds to a growing understanding of how our brain knows where we are. Groundbreaking discoveries in this field won last year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for John O'Keefe, a neuroscientist at University College London, who discovered “place cells” in the hippocampus, a brain region most associated with memory. These cells activate when we move into a specific location, so that groups of them form a map of the environment.

everything wrote:what is it? why do some people have it? and some people are so bad with it?

it turns out humans can stay oriented really, really well, provided that their language and culture requires them to keep track of this information.

what's cool about languages, like the languages spoken in Pormpuraaw, is that they don't use words like left and right, and instead, everything is placed in cardinal directions like north, south, east and west. So the way you say hi, is to say, which way are you heading? And the answer should be, north, northeast in the far distance; how about you?

So you might say, there's an ant on your northwest leg.