A new study has identified a neural compass in the human brain that consistently tracks the direction of north. Published in *The Journal of Neuroscience* and led by the University of Pennsylvania, the research pinpoints two brain regions that continuously monitor forward movement direction and are critical for maintaining spatial orientation. The discovery could lead to new techniques for the early diagnosis and monitoring of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.
Researchers, coordinated by Zhengang Lu and Russell Epstein, gathered brain scans from 15 volunteers as they navigated a taxi through a virtual city. The team identified two specific regions that appear to constantly track a person’s direction of travel relative to the north-south axis. This directional signal remained steady across different virtual cities and throughout various stages of the driving experiment, including picking up passengers, navigating streets, and dropping passengers off at their destinations.
“Losing one’s sense of direction is a phenomenon that can occur in neurodegenerative diseases,” commented Epstein. “Continuing to explore the function of these two brain regions could therefore help in the early diagnosis or monitoring of the progression of these pathologies. We are also interested in understanding how people use both external stimuli, like what they see, and internal stimuli to orient themselves—this could shed light on the challenges faced by people with vision problems.”