#29. Place Cells: How we know where we are - Prof. Kate Jeffery

Professor Kate Jeffery, Head of School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow. Discusses her work on our idea of place, space and navigation. We get an introduction to place cells which are the neurons in the brain which help us identify our location in space. We speak about how these were discovered how they work and where research on our understanding of place and direction is going.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introductions
• 6:44 What are place cells and how do they work?
• 11:55 Place cells, the hippocampus and memory
• 20:41 Are place cells only found in the hippocampus?
• 24:59 Do the same processes work in imagining/visualizing where we are?
• 31:11 Where do these cells get their information of location from?
• 37:07 Current and future research
• 43:43 Wrap up

Transcript

0:05

Uh, awesome. So welcome everybody to the Smooth Brain Society. Uh, today we have an international guest, another one. Um, but this guest is very special because I'm going to read off all the accomplishments and the CV and Amer can Amer who's joining us as well is just going to go a while for each thing. So, so, so professor Kate Jeffrey, um, is the head of school of the school of psychology and neuroscience at the university of Glasgow. Formerly, she was at UCL and found, which is University College London, and founded and directed the Institute of Behavioral Neuroscience there. She is also the co-director of the electrophysiology company Exona. And in 2021-2022, she was the vice dean of research at the Faculty of Brain Sciences. She is also a fellow at the Royal Society of Biology and a fellow at the Royal Society navigation. These are some of the things. She also has nearly 10,000 citations on her publications, as far as I have found, but should be more. And she has her own Wikipedia page, which I assume is not written by her, which means it's legit. So those are just some of the accomplishments. But I welcome Professor Jeffrey onto the Smooth Brain Society. It's an honor to have you. Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here. So we start, I gave a bit of your accomplishments, but it would be really good to have a background of your kind of journey to where you, to how you got to your position now. So if you could take the floor. Right. Yeah. So I don't know how much detail you want me to go into. As much as you'd like. So well, my journey started down south, in Dunedin. So I was and grew up in Dunedin, and I went to medical school there at Otago University. And while I was there, in our third year of the course, we did this course called Behavioral Science. Actually, in my first year, I had done an optional module in psychology. It was something that I was able to do as part of my kind of pre-med course. So I'd been introduced to psychology, and I thought science and I thought this is really cool because it sort of delved into questions of the mind and what causes the mind. I did my project for that year on information theory and learned about the mathematical basis of things like neural networks, which is kind of a pretty early discipline at that stage. I just found myself really gripped by these ideas. As I finished my training, I became more and more convinced that I wanted to study the brain and understand how the brain makes the mind, basically. So I decided to leave clinical medicine and go into research. And I did a Master of Medical Science with Cliff Abraham. He was and is working on this phenomenon called synaptic plasticity, which is about how the connections between neurons change with learning or change with activity. And so I learned the techniques of electrophysiological recording and kind of got interested in the structure where these recordings were made called the hippocampus, which I didn't know anything about when I started, but it turned out that the hippocampus is really important for making memories and for making a mental map of space, which is really, really central to how the mind functions really. So I've kind of found myself. studying how the brain makes the mind essentially, and I just decided that's where I wanted to stay. So I signed up to do a PhD across the other side of the world with Richard Morris at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. And so I was continuing to study synaptic plasticity, but I was getting more interested in its connections with behavior and thinking. And I learned about... this phenomenon that's exhibited by those cells in the hippocampus called place fields. So as an animal is exploring its environment, these neurons become active when the animal goes into a particular place. And it was becoming increasingly evident that the hippocampus was, you know, it's making memories, but the way that it's making memories is by making a map of space and attaching those memories to that map. And these place cells are the foundation for that. And I just thought this is amazing. how do these play cells know where the rat is and all of that. So after I finished my PhD, I moved down to London to work with John O'Keefe, who's the person who discovered play cells. And then my career just kind of carried on from there. I spent the years since investigating that question, really, how do play cells know where the animal is? And that's a sort of smaller version of a bigger question of how do we know where we are? How do we remember that? So that's the basic story. I stayed at UCL for quite a long time and built up a lab there, built up a broader research community, the behavioral neuroscience sort of community there. And then recently I was offered this opportunity to move to Glasgow and set up a similar community in Glasgow, trying to connect the brain to the mind essentially. And so that's where I am at the moment. That's awesome. Just to clarify, but just to recollect, John O'Keefe is the one who won the Nobel Prize in 2014 for his work, isn't it? That's right. That's right. He won a half share of that prize for the discovery of place songs. So I was really thrilled about that. When I joined his lab, interest was steadily growing in these play cells, but it was still kind of a niche area. And then in the decades following that, it became increasingly evident how important they were. It eventually became obvious to me that discovery needed to be recognized somehow, and then clearly it was obvious to everyone else as well. So I think taking a... Let's take this from the top. So my first question to you would probably be, what exactly are play cells? Are they a type of neuron? And if so, what sort of specific role do they play which is different from generic neuron? Yeah, I don't know that there's such a thing as a generic neuron, if I'm honest. I mean, these are generic neurons in the sense that they have the same structure as all neurons with a cell with processes that reach out and connect to other cells. These ones are quite large, so they're relatively easy to record from because when I started out, the technique for recording from animals that were awake and… walking around and doing stuff. It was just quite a new technique. And so he happened to be recording from a brain area where it's very easy to pick up those signals and to be able to record from a single neuron. And I mean, these are tiny little things. So one of these neurons, the cell itself is about the thickness of a hair, you know, so they're quite small. But this technique meant that... could record for hours, sometimes for days, so it's very stable recording. So what makes these ones special is that they only become active when the animal walks into a particular place in the environment. So typically we'll be recording as it's walking around in a box in the laboratory, just exploring, trying to gather bits of rice that someone's thrown on the floor to encourage it to move around. So the animal isn't really having to do much kind of thinking, as it were. navigating. But these cells are tracking where the animal is and if you just record one of them, you'll find that every time the animal goes into a particular place, let's say it's just one corner of the box, one particular corner, every time it goes over to that corner, that cell suddenly becomes really active. So it starts firing lots and lots of nerve impulses or action potentials, as we call them. And then the animal walks away and that cell stops. So the question is, how does quote unquote, no, when the rat has gone to that corner, and how does it know when it's gone away again? Like what's the information? Because the cell is just in the brain, it's getting inputs from other cells. So what's in those inputs that says you're in a corner right now? It's a really intriguing question. Yeah, it's funny to think that I'm extrapolating this to humans to think that if you go into your house, you have a certain set of neurons which would activate in a certain pattern versus if you go to your office or go to what particular room in your house versus somewhere else in your house. Do you see the same neuron activate for different regions? I'm assuming it's a pattern of activation or is it just like one neuron per place kind of thing? No, no, your assumption is right. It's a pattern. So each neuron is active in many different places. And if you record from an environment that's sufficiently large that it'll be active in several places within that environment. So each cell has capacity to represent, if you like, multiple different locations. So for whatever part of the brain is reading the output of these neurons, if you think of the other bits of the brain that are using this information for something else, they need to... able to read lots of these neurons at once, because if you were just following one of them, there'd be an ambiguity about where you were. You wouldn't know if you were in your living room or in the bathroom, because this particular neuron is active in both of those rooms. But if you look at the pattern of neurons, you're looking at thousands and thousands of them, there's only one place where this particular 500 neurons are active all at the same time. And so you've got a very specific code for a specific location. The same physical location can have more than one code. For example, if you change the situation that the animal is in. So to take a real world example, imagine you go into a large space that sometimes is a sports hall, but in the evening you can fill it up with chairs and make it a concert theater or something like that. Lots of schools have that. So you could imagine that the hippocampus has a different map for those two things. When you go in and it's a sports hall, then there's one pattern of play cells active. When you go in the evening and it's set up to be a concert theatre, then you've got different cells active. So it's kind of the same place. Part of you knows it's the same place, but another part of you is going, it's a different situation, it's a different setting. So these play cells, really, I've taken to thinking of them in my mind now as more like situation cells. So it's place. plus the significance of the place at that particular moment. Yeah. So the second example you sort of gave was a place which is sort of is familiar to you, but is arranged in a different way. How do these cells activate in a place which is completely unfamiliar to the perceiver? So does it work as if it just sort of imagined reimagined it as a familiar place and then takes things from there? Or does it start from a place of having no idea what's going on and then learning of learning. So if the new environment that the animal goes into is sufficiently different that you can reasonably imagine that the rats going, oh, this is a different place, then you'll see what looks like a completely different map of the place cells. So we call it a map loosely. The sort of the pattern of activity of the cells in that new space, it just looks like a new map. If the new space is reasonably similar to the other one, sometimes you see similarities where there might be a cell that's active in the same corner or something like that. But that's pretty rare. And I think that only happens if there's a real ambiguity such that the rat actually is a bit confused, rat or mouse or human or whatever, actually is a bit confused about whether it's a new space. So if it's definitely looks like a new space, you just get a completely new map. Just seems to be. generated de novo. It takes a few minutes to really consolidate so that the activity of the neurons is a little bit imprecise for the first few minutes, but then it settles down quite quickly. And then that's quite stable. So if the animal goes away and then comes back at a later date, it'll recreate that new map. So it looks like the new map gets established pretty quickly and then locked in, as it were. there's still some debate about whether the new map is what they call pre-configured, like whether the cells become active in a new place that's already predetermined by the connections that exist, or whether it's kind of random. So the cells become a little bit randomly active, and if one happens to become randomly active in this new room, then you get synaptic plasticity, actually. where I started my career with the synaptic plasticity phenomenon, connections strengthen to that cell so that it kind of becomes, if you like, attached to that location. And then subsequently every time the rat goes back there, it'll become active again. So I think probably my view is that, yeah, it's a bit random to begin with. It's not strongly pre-configured, but it's a bit pre-configured. The cell is slightly more likely than by chance to fire in a particular location because of its connections. once it starts firing, those connections get stronger and then it will certainly fire there in the future. It's a very plastic system, it's learning all the time. Because it's learning all the time, is it also forgetting all the time as well? So if I was to be put in a city which I hadn't been to in 10 years or 15 years, or if you decided to come fire randomly and then sort of settle down into the previous pattern? Or would it form a new pattern to what it was, what the pattern was the last time? Yeah, that's a good question. And I don't think we fully know the answer yet. No, because we haven't done the really long term experiments like that. But one thing that has emerged, which is not fully consolidated yet is that There's a bit of a turnover in the maps over long periods of time. So if you record over a long period of time, you do find that even in the same location, there'll be a different map. But mixed in with that new pattern, it seems like there are some cells who have the same pattern. So they've held on to the same pattern for a really long time. But, you know, we... We don't have a lot of data on this, but I think it's beginning to look now like there are different rates of turnover for different cells. Some cells will lose the pattern quite quickly and some will lose it very, very slowly. It's been suggested that what that does is it enables you to store in your map some information about how long ago it was since you were there last. So If you go back and the cells have the same pattern that they had the last time you were there, then the brain can infer that it must have been quite recently. Whereas if the pattern has changed quite a lot and only a few cells still have the same map, then it must have been a long time ago. So some people have suggested that this is a kind of a timestamp, if you like, this turnover of activity as a timestamp of sorts. So I quite like that idea. I don't know if it's true. I think we have still quite a lot of work to understand why the pattern changes. But yeah, it's an interesting question about forgetting and the degree to which it's a feature or a bug of the system. Yeah, the reason I asked is because you mentioned all of these neurons and the hippocampus and the hippocampus is famously known for memories. And with memories, have we lost Kate? No, I'm still here. Your video just paused. I wasn't sure. But yeah, because you said the hippocampus is involved in memories and we aren't and memories as we know from previous episodes as well, but from learning that memories are fallible, they're remade, they're reconnected. All of those things, I was just wondering, do you forget and yeah. Yeah, yeah, so the role of the place cells in memory is still being worked out because it seems, well, to some of us. We lost him. We did drop that. Welcome back. Thanks. So I guess my question was recorded so you can start from, yeah, were you dropped off? Yeah, so the role of the hippocampus, to my mind, there are two roles for the hippocampus in memory. And I'm still not fully resolved in my own mind whether it's kind of versions of the same thing or whether they really are different. So one of them is to, establish this map and to learn the map and to store it. Another one is to remember the events that happened in the location where that map was active. That's called episodic memory, memory for the one-off events of life. For example, us remembering this conversation in the future. That's something that only happens once, whereas making a map of space is a constant kind of background type of memory. And we're still trying to work out how these different components of memory fit together in the campus. Do the place cells do both of those types of things, or are they just all about the map? My own view is that they're about the map because we don't see a lot of transient activity of place cells outside the place field, like you might expect of these cells, but also busy recording and storing events. So I think... all of that stuff happens elsewhere and that the role of the place cells is to kind of link to where those things are happening. So it's called the sort of indexing theory of the hippocampus. So in terms of forgetting, the forgetting of episodes and the forgetting of a mat may not necessarily have the same properties or be the same process. And I don't think we know very much about forgetting how it happens, whether it's an active process or whether it's just a kind of a capacity limit. on the system. But yeah, it's an interesting question. I think one that probably we'll learn a lot more about in the coming years. Well, as this phenomenon helps us gauge our environment, also getting the walls up, I imagine it also would include obstacles and danger, right? So my question would be, how, well, I'm really digging deep into my year nine, year in biology class here. Um, I, well, as far as I remember when dangerous sense, our reflexes tend to take over a fight or flight sort of hormones tend to take over and the, the reflexes that tend to tend to move with the spinal cord, right? So how. Are these cells also present in different areas rather than just the brain? Now then, this is, sorry, the high... Sorry, what was the term? The location of memories? In the hippocampus. Yes, in the hippocampus. That's okay. Are these cells present in places other than the hippocampus? That's a... That's a very good question. That's actually several questions. So starting with the last ones. So we are now starting to find place cells in other places in the brain. And that's kind of interesting. And we are in the process of trying to figure out are these inputs to the hippocampus or are they outputs from the hippocampus? So is it that the hippocampus is telling these other parts of the brain? where the animal is so that they can use that for whatever they need to do. Or are they involved in computing the location of the animal and sending that to the hippocampus? I think it's the former. I think they're probably the outputs from the hippocampus. But usually when I think things, I turn out to be wrong, so it could go either way. So in terms of how you use this information for things like escaping from danger, for example, you've mentioned reflexes and I think It's becoming evident that there are multiple systems for things like that. So we do have simple escape reflexes in the spinal cord, like if you touch something hot, your arm will pull away. That's a spinal reflex. It's not immediately controlled by the more thinking parts of the brain, although eventually they kind of come into play as well because if you touch something hot but it's a casserole that you've just spent two hours baking, you might suppress your instinct. So there's a lot of interplay between the spinal cord and the brain. But also when you get to more complex types of threat behavior, so for example, you know, danger strikes and you need to run to safety, then you need to start thinking, where is a safe place? Do I run for the nearest cover or do I pause for a moment and actually I will... actually be safer if I ran not to the nearest place but to that place that's a bit further away but I know there's shelter or something like that. So all these layers of brain are busy computing and trying to decide what to do. So the hippocampus has a role in that and its role, so it interacts a lot with the fear systems in the brain like the amygdala which is a structure that's very important for fear and other emotional systems in the brain. So these parts of the brain are all talking to each other and exchanging information. and then weighing up pros and cons of various types of information. So there's a reactive research program trying to understand how this all works and how it learns and how it can go wrong. Sometimes these threat systems get pathologically activated and people are in this state of hypervigilance and escape mode, even when they're actually safe, you know, the sort of mental health. disorders like agoraphobia and panic and so on that involve these systems. Yeah, there's a lot going on in the brain. Because we were talking about fear systems and memory, I wanted to ask one more thing about the place and sense of place before we move on to maybe other things which you do like direction and stuff. So Nick, but with place, do you, would you know, I know this is harder to measure in rats, probably more human thing, but if we imagine something to the same place cells activate as, so if I imagine a location, would I be? having the same brain activity or same place or activity as I would if I was actually there? Yeah, very, very interesting question. So, so there is some evidence from humans that that's, that's true. Because it is possible to study the act of human brain to some extent, so we can use brain scanning techniques, functional magnetic resonance imaging, so FMRIs, we call it. So it is possible, we can't record single neurons with that technique, but we can see patterns of activity across regions of the brain. And it has been possible to show that when people are imagining spaces and the hippocampus is becoming active in a way that's consistent with activating a place cell map. But people have also, using rats, have looked at what's happening when they're thinking about a place they... intend to go to. And there is some suggestion, although it's a little bit disputed, the evidence is not fully consolidated, but there is some suggestion that you see patterns of place cell activity that reflect the path that the animal is planning to take. It's a bit controversial, but it's kind of enticing. And I think it's quite likely that is. is what's happening, that animals are capable of imagining too, and that also involves the place cell system. We just haven't quite got the perfect experimental paradigm to tell us about. The nice thing about humans is that they can tell us things, or we can tell them things. Whereas with animals, you have to train them to do things by rewarding them with food. And so you're not necessarily studying the same process. It's a bit more complex. your, what you say, the rat language or like your squeak squeaking abilities to be able to translate. Yeah. We do. Do you have any more questions around place or should we ask some questions moving a bit forward? Yes, I do have one more actually. So since these visualizations rely on memory, I was wondering how these place cells act in terms of visualizing future states of the environment. So, of course, working in tandem with other parts of your brain too. So you know an environment exists in a certain state, but you know it's been influenced by something while you weren't in that space and were you able to visualize what the end state of that environment would have been. been given the influence of whatever stimulus. Yeah, so this is a hot topic at the moment. I think you're referring to predictive coding, which is the ability of neural networks to be reflecting possible future states, from which the most probable one can be selected and so on. So people have looked at predictive coding in place cells, and it's a little bit mixed. So we certainly see predictive encoding at very short time scales. So over a few hundred milliseconds, it's possible to see that a place cell is actually encoding not the exact place where the rat is right now, but where it's going to be in a split seconds time. My own view about that is that that's just a reflection of the fact that one of the inputs to the place computation system is is self-motion information about the movement that's going on, and that movement carries with it a sort of predictive component. If I'm moving in this direction at this particular speed, this is where I'm going to be in a moment from now type of thing. And I'm not sure that it's functional just so much as a reflection of the fact that some of these inputs are dynamic. But we've also looked at longer time scales. So some colleagues and I This was an experiment that was led by Alinor Duvelle, who was studying whether place cells in a multi-compartment environment where a rack moves between compartments, if you change the connectedness of those compartments so that sometimes it's possible to go from compartment A to compartment B, and sometimes the door is locked and it's not possible. Do we see any change in the PlayCell patterns that reflects that connectivity and therefore reflects possible future states, if you like? So it's a way of getting at the predictive coding question. And she didn't see any evidence that there's that type of predictive coding. So PlayCell in a given compartment didn't change its activity based on the possible other compartments that the rack of access from that space. It just seemed to be responding. to the physical state of that compartment at the time. So I'm skeptical that there's predictive coding in the Playstyle system. But a lot of other people would disagree. So it's quite an active area of investigation. My next question is, how does the hippocampus receive input? So where is it receiving input from to tell me or the rat or whatever, this is the place I'm in? Is this a visual thing? Cause I know rats are generally pretty blind or is it a combination of multiple senses which you're getting this information. Yeah, that's a very important question, one that's exercised us for a long time. And when we started addressing this question, we did exactly what you've suggested. We looked at the primary sensory inputs, you know, is vision required, is audition required, is olfaction required and so on. And the answer is yes to pretty much all of the senses. So they're all... They're all used, but none of them is essential. So place cells will form nice place fields, for example, in rats that don't have vision. But there need to be other sensors that can take over, like the tactile sense, sense of touch, and so on. But the question has kind of moved on from the primary sensors now to what happens to the primary sensors after the information has arrived first in the brain, that there's perception areas, if you like, what happens next. And it looks like what happens is that information gets kind of bundled into modules that have different kind of components of space. So for example, we have found regions of the brain that seem to encode or reflect the direction that the animal is facing in. cells in these regions will fire anywhere in the space. So they're not place cells, but they'll fire only if the rat is facing in a particular direction. And these cells themselves use multiple sensors. They'll use vision, but they'll also use the sense of motion, the sense of, you know, the vestibular sense, the sense of acceleration and so on. So all this information from the sensors gets packaged into this directional signal. There is another area of the brain that seems to be sensitive to the distance that the animals travel through space. And again, it uses multiple primary sensors to compute that signal. And then those signals get sent to the place cells. So I think what the place cells are receiving is not primary sensory information, but packaged information that has this kind of, what a psychologist might call semantic information, information about direction, information about distance, information about which environment you're in. information about the state of the environment and so on. So we're starting to realize it's a very hierarchical process. The computation of the mat is built up from sub-components, but what I and some colleagues call tools, so the tools that are needed to build up a mat are assembled earlier on in the brain, if you like, which I think is a little bit of a different way of thinking about things from artificial intelligence. So I told you we would get to artificial intelligence eventually. Because the brain is sort of like a big machine learning system. It's kind of computing changes and connections based on inputs that are coming in and so on. But the thing that makes it different from many artificial systems is this kind of modular specialist functions that different regions of the brain have. determined by the pattern of connections and also the properties, the rules by which neurons receive their inputs and generate outputs. And those properties are why it is that one part of the brain computes a direction signal and a different part of the brain computes some different signal. So I think this kind of modular organization is a very important principle of brain organization. neural networks and AI work because each neural network is tailored to a specific task and each architecture is trained on the data which is catered to a specific task. So the same connections may not work for a different task. In that sense it's quite similar but they aren't quite interconnected as they are in the brain. Yes, I think that's the next step. So you create specialized networks, but then you have to get them to interact. And that, I think, is the tricky thing. A huge part of the brain is devoted to these long-range connections between modules and getting them to interact. They need to exchange information in a way that's meaningful to each of the modules, if you like. So I think we don't really yet understand. quite how that's done, but we're making big strides. So it would be interesting to see how the AI community in parallel solves the same problem and whether there are any similarities to how biological systems have solved this problem. Yeah, we are pretty clueless as how deep learning actually operates, because for us as well, it's more about all of it's done through post-hoc tests at the moment, because there's not enough to explain what's actually going on in the neural networks. Yeah, it's fascinating. I've watched this field grow from practically nothing, and it's just fascinating to see it develop. So You said it, you just said you see the field grow from practically nothing to where it is. What do you think? Um, you said you've also mentioned a few hot topics. So what are your current research goals? What, what do you see is the next main thing? Um, and in your, in your lab and for the research field in general. So my lab, sort of pretty much, I'm reestablishing my lab at the moment. So all options are open. But I think the focus will continue to be on space because that's just the thing that I've always loved, you know, particularly three dimensional and complex space. So the field started out studying rats in boxes, but the real world is very complex. And I have always been intrigued about how that complexity is handled. You know, how do you handle things like the fact that the real world has hills and mountains and valleys and multiple apartments, rooms and all of this stuff. Where is all of that stored? Because place cells, they seem to reflect where the animal is right now. But where is everything else stored and how do you access it and all of that? So there's lots of questions to answer there. But for the field more generally, the hippocampus and what it's doing, I think the next big thing is this interaction between space and episodic memory. How does that happen? Where are episodes encoded when they happen? Where are they stored? How does the hippocampus find them again? How does it manage the dual task of keeping your memories separate so that you can remember individual ones? But also... blending them together so that you can learn from the patterns of experiences that you have. So for example, the first time you go to a wedding, that's an episodic memory. It's a one-off event. But once you've been to a few weddings, you build up a template, if you like, what they call a schema of a wedding. And that's built up from multiple experiences. So your brain is both blending the experiences together to build a schema, but also keeping them separate and how those two things are handled so that they don't interfere with each other, I think is a really interesting question. And how are they retrieved over the long time? When you've lived a lifetime, you've had millions and millions of experiences, how does your brain find the right ones? And I can tell you from personal experience that it gets harder the remarkably good at remembering isolated experiences. And that's a huge computational challenge for the brain. So I think these are all big questions to be addressed. I had one more question. I am cognizant of the time, that's why. I had one more question about navigation, because we spoke a lot about place, and I did want to touch a little bit about sensor direction navigation among complex spaces. Do you think... Um, or do you see tend to see different performances and performances improve among your rats in navigation and their activity? Um, or are certain rest is better at navigating than others and the same goes for humans. I know some people are better at Remembering directions and where they were than others are Yeah, yeah, I think this is something we're becoming more aware of as individual differences. Because when we're working with rats, we tend to think of them as carbon copies of each other. But you know, it doesn't take very long running experiments before you realize that you've always got a super smart rat in your cohort or a really dumb rat, you know, that's holding your experiment up or whatever. So, you know, it's a bit of a pejorative term. I shouldn't say that. But you've got a rat who's performing the way your expectations. work and other rats that are not. So there are inevitably differences in how animals are configured, even rats which are genetically reasonably similar to each other. And of course, as humans we know that there are individual differences. Some people are very good at navigating, some people are very bad. Some of that I think is due to experience. So if you're trained to be attentive. to certain types of information in the environment. For example, if you were a scout as a child and you learned to read a map and to look out for landmarks and things, and maybe you took those habits into adulthood and therefore you're always good at reading maps and navigating. But I think there are individual differences too. Some people readily grasp what a map is showing you and how to use it. Some people just struggle with that their entire lives. differences in connectivity in certain parts of the brain. For example, I'm quite interested in this part of the brain called retrospinal cortex, which seems to be involved in processing information about the environment and relating it to the map. So for example, in seeing a scene and therefore understanding what direction you must be facing. And I think people vary quite a lot in how good they are at doing that. there's some evidence that that's because of differences in how active the reticence is when they're trying to do this. So I think we're going to learn more about what makes individuals different. And I think that will give us some tools with which to help people, but also some tools with which to design better environments so that whatever type of navigator you are, whatever skills you're naturally good at. you will find that the environment has been designed in a way that you can function well in it. And I don't think we're very good at that at the moment. And I'm quite interested in working with architects and designers to try and help us design better environments so that it works for the diversity of navigational styles that people have. Awesome. We've got one minute left. Amr, do you have any other questions? Oh, a large number, but I don't think you have time. Yeah. Exactly. Should we leave it to you then? Do you have any other key salient points which you'd like to get across before we wrap up? And then we can hopefully have you on again some other time. Oh, gosh. I should have a salient. salient point in mind. I mean, I could finish with one that's a much bigger question, sort of a much bigger picture than we've been talking about, which is the other kind of arm of my interests in the past few years has been the climate crisis and the fact that we're studying brains and we're studying them with the assumption that brains will continue into the indefinite future. For example, there's a lot of work on things like dementia, how do we stop dementia. part of me continues to be really interested in this. The other part of me thinks that there's not much point doing this if we don't solve the really big problem that we're facing, which is the spiraling out of control of our environment. So, you know, I think neuroscience research needs to continue, but I think we all need to be also actively involved in making sure that we have a future where this neuroscience research is useful. So, you know, I don't want to finish on too much of a downer, but I would urge all of your listeners to be taking this issue really seriously because I think it's a very serious issue. I'm optimistic because I do think humans are remarkably intelligent and we're remarkably cooperative and science, I think, is a huge force for good. I like to think that scientists can be at the vanguard of helping solve this problem, but we do need to get out of our labs. a bit and get active. So that would be my finishing thought, I guess. Awesome. We usually don't finish on a downer because we usually ask like four or five funny questions. But considering you're a place person, if there's any place in the world you could live, where would it be? Oh, gosh, that's such a difficult question. because there are so many places. I am in the fortunate position of having been able to choose really good places. I've come to Scotland because it reminds me so much of New Zealand and a large part of my heart remains in New Zealand. And it's kind of a way of living in New Zealand while not living in New Zealand. Yeah, I get that. Yeah, so yeah, I have to say for now, Scotland. And since your research is about how we perceive the environment, if your life were a movie, what genre would it be? Oh God. If my life were a movie, yeah, it would be a pretty dull movie. One of those movies where the hero labors unrecognized for many, many years and then towards the end of their life makes a world shattering discovery. I don't know if that is a genre. We can make it its own. And again because of the environment if you were an animal what animal would you like to be? Probably a cat because cats just seem to have the best lives. I agree. Being a cat lover, many years. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. The very last question which we always ask is, if you had any advice for our listeners, what would that be? Get involved. Stay cheerful. Be good and kind to the people around you. Um, and just try to make the world a better place. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks, Amr again for joining. Uh, thank you so much, professor. It was heaps of fun. Hopefully next time we can have a longer discussion. We have so much more to ask you. It's a pleasure. And thank you. Thank you for shining a light on this field because it's, I think science communication is so important and I very much appreciate it. people like you who spend the time and effort. Thank you, thank you so much. Everyone, thanks for listening. Take care. Thanks a lot.