Rebroadcast: How the Bat Brain Knows Its Place

Have you ever spaced out while traveling somewhere but still made it to your destination effortlessly? Our brain is amazing at calculating exactly where we are relative to things around us, but this is a skill we often take for granted. In this episode, Producer Sama Ahmed talks with Dr. Michael Yartsev about how we know where we are in the world, how we make memories, and how we make decisions. Dr. Yartsev is uncovering all of this utilizing a rather unconventional and totally awesome animal: the bat! This episode is a re-release of an episode from 2013.

64: CTOR Bites - Good Vibrations: Love Songs from a Fly

For our second Bite, we sit down with Dr. Mala Murthy, a professor at Princeton University, who uses fruit fly songs to answer questions about how flies can respond dynamically to changing environments and how their brains are wired to carry out these behaviors.

Check out this video for a deeper understanding of Dr. Murthy's research!


More on the Murthy lab's research...


Produced by Sam Ancona Esselmann with editing help from Meryl Horn

How the bat brain knows its place: Michael Yartsev

The ability of animals to navigate through the world is essential for survival and has been studied by scientists for over 40 years. Scientists have identified neurons called “place cells” that reside in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. Individual place cells are active only when the animal is in a particular location in space, and populations of place cells work together to create an internal representation of the environment.

Up until now, experiments involving the hippocampus and place cells have been conducted in two-dimensional settings, often with rats running through a flat maze. Our guest this month, Dr. Michael Yartsev, a fellow at The Princeton Neuroscience Institute and previously the Weizmann Institute, is interested in how the 3D world is perceived in the brain. He hopes to figure this out by recording activity from place cells in the brains of flying bats. Listen as Dr. Yartsev describes this unique system to study an old question.

Hosted by Osama Ahmed, Karuna Meda