• Why do you think some people have a better internal sense of direction than others do? Do you have a good sense of direction?

When you get lost in an unfamiliar part of town, are you able to navigate your way back to where you started? If you exit a building on your college campus through an unfamiliar door, do you have a sense of which way you should walk to get to your destination? Can you readily point out which direction is north?

If so, you’re not alone—many people have this ability to retrace their steps, fi gure out where they are in relation to familiar locations, or even intuitively know which way is north.

Researchers are discovering that this sense may not just be a matter of learning—it may, in fact, be inborn.

Scientists are learning that certain regions of the brain in and around the hippocampus aid our directional sense. Cells in the hippocampus, called place cells, become active only when we visit a specifi c part of the environment.

Other cells, called grid cells , help to defi ne a grid that enables us to know where we are in relation to our environment. Working together with other cells, called headdirection cells, these brain regions give us an internal sense of how we are moving through space—a sort of internal map of where we are and where we have been

(O’Keefe & Dostrovsky, 1971; Fyhn et al., 2007; Langston et al., 2010).