Neuroscientists have discovered brain cells that form multiple coordinate systems to tell us "where we are" in a sequence of behaviors. These cells can play out different sequences of actions, just like a music box can be configured to play different sequences of tones. The findings help us understand the algorithms used by the brain to flexibly generate complex behaviours, such as planning and reasoning, and might be useful in understanding how such processes go wrong in psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia.
The research, published today in Nature, outlines how scientists at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL and University of Oxford studied mice learning different behavioural sequences but with the same structure. This allowed the team to uncover how mice generalise structures to new tasks, a hallmark of intelligent behaviour. Every day we solve new problems by generalizing from our knowledge.
Take cooking for example. When faced with a new recipe, you are able to use your background knowledge of similar recipes to infer what steps are needed, even if you have never made the meal before. We wanted to understand at a detailed cellular level how the brain achieves this and also to infer from this brain activity the algorithms being used to solve this problem.
" Dr. Mohamady El Gaby, first author on the study and postdoctoral neuroscientist in the Behrens lab at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL and Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxfor.