Researchers at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre and Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL have revealed a brain mechanism that mice use to instinctively escape to shelter when faced with a threat. This is the first time that neuroscientists have been able to find such a clear link between spatial goals and actions.
The study, published today in Nature, explains how mice incorporate knowledge of safe locations to execute the most efficient route to shelter. The neuroscientists found that two areas of the mouse brain, the retrosplenial cortex (RSP) and superior colliculus (SC), form a circuit that encodes the direction to a shelter. When faced with a threat, the RSP-SC circuit enables mice to accurately orient to shelter and escape to safety.
“If a fire alarm sounded right now, you would instinctively know how to leave the room to get to safety. This is because your brain…
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