Forget the iWatch or Fitbit, the brain already has its own internal odometer and stopwatch. 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.