Hosted by Corpus Curiosum, an online lecture series catered to early career researchers and designed to stimulate critical thinking in Neuroscience.
The hippocampus and neighboring areas of the brain have been highly preserved across mammalian evolution. Their function is mainly associated with the formation of new memories and with spatial orientation. I will review how the activity of a variety of cells in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex correlates with kinematic variables such as position, speed and direction, and discuss how the activity of each cell type could contribute to spatial navigation. I will also show how recent experiments suggest that, in order to have accurate spatial maps, our brains need to a precise estimation of time.