Uploaded November 2015 | Updated September 2026, 11 hours ago

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Rats running on a treadmill helped a team of researchers from Boston University understand the ways memories about our location are formed and stored. The team put rats through several test scenarios and monitored the animals’ grid cells — a specific type of neuron that helps track changes in location – to determine if those cells also helped track time and distance, independent of external cues, to build a memory.

This video shows firing activity of grid cell during treadmill running.

Read the full story here: discovermagazine.com/mind/the-brains-internal-odometer-and-stopwatch

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Credit: Benjamin J. Kraus, Mark P. Brandon, Robert J. Robinson, Michael A. Connerney, Michael E. Hasselmo, Howard Eichenbaum. 2015. During Running in Place, Grid Cells Integrate Elapsed Time and Distance Run. Neuron. 88(3) 578-589. doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.031.

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