Emotional Renovations
How your brain twists together emotion and place
By Moheb Costandi
Home is more than a place on a map. It evokes a particular set of feelings, and a sense of safety and belonging. Location, memories, and emotions are intertwined within those walls. Over the past few decades, this sentiment has gained solid scientific grounding. And earlier this year, researchers identified some of the cells that help encode our multifaceted homes in the human brain.
In the early 1970s, neuroscientist John O’Keefe of University College London and his colleagues began to uncover the brain mechanisms responsible for navigating space. They monitored the electrical activity of neurons within a part of the brain called the hippocampus. As the animals moved around an enclosure with electrodes implanted in their hippocampus, specific neurons fired in response to particular locations.¹ These neurons, which came to be known as place cells, each had a unique “place field” where it fired: For example, neuron A might be active when the rat was in the far right corner, near the edge of the enclosure, while neuron B fired when the rat was in the opposite corner.
Since then, further experiments have shown that the hippocampus contains at least two other types of brain cells involved in navigation. Grid cells fire periodically as…
