
Neuroscientists find long-sought bat sat-nav neurons - stichers
http://www.nature.com/news/sat-nav-neurons-tell-bats-where-to-go-1.21275
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tantalor
> Having the goal in the centre of the room, so that approach paths covered
> 360 degrees, turned out to be the essential element in pinpointing the
> vector cells. It meant that the team could verify that the same neurons were
> firing whatever the direction of approach.

This reminds me of hacking on old Mac OS games with a program called Pandora's
Box.

[http://www.macgamefiles.com/item/11768/Pandoras-
Box/](http://www.macgamefiles.com/item/11768/Pandoras-Box/)

The basic idea is to dump the game's memory, then do something like lose a
life, then scan the memory dump for values that changed from the old value to
the new value. It almost always worked!

~~~
TFortunato
This was a feature of the GameShark for Nintendo 64 as well for finding new
codes beyond what they published.

For example, if you had 100 rounds of ammo left, you would press a button on
the cartridge, and have it search the ram for the value 100. Drop back into
the game, fire off a shot, and hit the button again to search for which of
those values changed to 99. Repeat until you found target area in memory and
make a code for it.

The device also had a parallel port interface to talk to it via a pc, but I
remember less about using that when I was a kid. Pretty basic technique, but
as a kid interested in technology, it's stuck with me to this day!

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nom
"That’s a surprise, considering how well this area has been studied by
researchers"

Is it? We don't know much about the individual types of neurons at all - it's
a sisyphean task, there are just too many.

We don't even know how a brain really functions, because it looks like it's
not just neurons and there has to be much more to it. Considering the
complexity, I'm almost certain there are many more mechanisms involved.

Remember: the brain doesn't come into existence with a fixed structure, it is
built up from an over-connected state, synapses are pruned during development
and after that it continues to change its structure over time depending on the
input from the environment. It's not that simple and I don't think that we'll
ever be able to understand it completely.

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stichers
Try saying that title 3 times fast.

~~~
hmahncke
>> summons Egyptian fruit bat >>

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novalis78
Just 58 neurons? That sounds pretty ... Small.

