| | |

Navigation Networks in the Brain

ByRichard Nissen Reading Time: 1 minute
Professor Kate Jeffery of University College London gave the annual address to the Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN) this year (2014). This article published in RIN’s Navigation News is, for me, a seminal step forward in describing the parameters of animal navigation and building a structure to delve deeper into how navigation might work.
Her idea that you need to know where North is in order to orientate your “map” makes sense of a whole lot of otherwise incomprehensible research. Knowing where North is without a map does not get you home.
Richard Nissen
Editor September 2014

Brain Feature

Similar Posts

  • Animal navigation and biological rhythms: the inertial theory by Antonio B. Nafarrate

    Editor’s comments: This paper is quite old but it does propose another navigation mechanism than the current obsession with magnetic orientation.  The magnetic field  has the terrible drawback of changing all the time and birds have migrating successfully before and after the Earth’s magnetic field flipped South for North.  Albatrosses fitted with head magnets (to…

  • Cuckoo tracking

    The Cuckoo is one of the migrants we know least about once it leaves the UK, however the BTO track, on their amazing site, the movements of five Cuckoos from breeding grounds in East Anglia to their winter quarters in Africa. http://www.bto.org/science/migration/tracking-studies/cuckoo-tracking Cuckoo tracking what we’ve learnt so far: http://www.bto.org/science/migration/tracking-studies/cuckoo-tracking/what-have-we-learnt  Latest Cuckoo tracking news: http://www.bto.org/science/migration/tracking-studies/cuckoo-tracking/european-cuckoo-study…

  • Monarch Butterflies

    Here is a link to Monarch Butterflies http://phys.org/tags/monarch+butterflies/ Editor’s remark I have difficulty understanding these results which  suggest that Cryptrochromes are involved which I am fairly clear is impossible as there is not enough time for the quantum coherence to take place. Inclination compasses are very inaccurate as there can be huge changes locally due to…

  • Avian Navigation

    www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17855194 Please look at this link as it covers important ground on Avian Navigation.  You will see that one of our heroes David Keays has established that the magnetite structure in the beaks of pigeons does not exist.  The magnetic theory still has problems because you cannot navigate using a compass without knowing where you…

  • The hippocampus of rats

    Prof Kate Jeffery has done some very interesting work on how the hippocampus of rats processes navigational information. Scientists are clear that the hippocampus is critical for navigation but believe that it is only one part of a larger system that has many functions including recognising landmarks, computing distances and directions etc. and forming memories….

  • Albatross Navigation

    The Albatross that ranges over huge areas of the South Atlantic Region in overcast weather where sun clues are seldom available to return to their breeding islands such as Crozet in the South Atlantic, work done by Bonadonna et al in 2004 shows that manipulating the albatrosses by altering their magnetic environment made no difference…