[bl]

The Mosers' work is very much deserving recognition. They've made fundamental discoveries with really beautiful experiments (well-designed, well-executed, thorough). On a personal note, I referenced their work on place cells as a possible use of phenomena I was studying in my own research. And I wasn't even aware of their ideas when I started (they occupied a slightly different sub-field of neuroscience). It's delightful to see the Mosers rewarded.

Another item of note: During introductory neuroscience class, the idea was "Hippocampus, learning & memory. Hippocampus, learning & memory. Hippocampus, learning & memory." Perhaps not so brutally, and I may have missed some subtleties. I found it quite refreshing to learn that the hippocampus was involved so deeply in a task that wasn't so starkly "This arbitrary experimental task is aversive; I, mouse, must avoid it." Hippocampus...is there anything it can't do? <Leonard Nimoy: "The answer is yes.">

Following is a neuroscientist's get-off-my-lawn rant

or

A Comment Wherein `bl Gripes about Stretched Tech Analogies Concerning Neuroscience.

A GPS device receives signals from a set of beacons with well-established, fixed locations (i.e., geostationary satellites). Knowing the beacons' fixed locations, the device is able to triangulate its own position. A GPS device can go to a completely unfamiliar location and work exactly as well as when its at a location its been to hundreds of times.

One could conceivably think of a mammalian visual system surmounted on a position-encoded cranium as equivalent to the GPS beacon system. But hippocampal place cells would have absolutely no contribution to navigating an unfamiliar environment because they had not been "trained".

[theoh]

Better to avoid the gripe... GPS satellites are not in fixed locations, and triangulation is not used to determine position (it is calculated based on time of flight to 4+ satellites.)

Sadly the ship has sailed on the use of GPS as a metaphor for "internal map". Since people don't know how it works there seems to be no possibility of correcting this trend. Another example is in the endorsement for this book: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Just-Freedom/

[bl]

Drat! I committed an error similar to the one I was griping against: being technically sloppy.

Believe it or not, I paused for half a heartbeat while typing fixed and triangulation while I was typing and thought to myself "Should I go double-check this on some hard-to-access reference, say Wikipedia? Nah. Better blurt this out before I head out the door for the day".

I ought to be careful how I phrase my gripes so that they convey my intention: keeping discussions accurate about subjects which I know a bit. Poor metaphors seem to aggravate me more than most.

Thanks for setting me straight.