"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being over whelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself" , - Friedrich Nietzsche
A new study from Dartmouth reveals that three regions of the brain in the posterior cerebral cortex, which the researchers call "place-memory areas," form a link between the brain's perceptual and memory systems. The findings are published in Nature Communications . "As we navigate our surroundings, information enters the visual cortex and somehow ends up as knowledge of where we are—the question is where this transformation into spatial knowledge occurs. We think that the place-memory areas might be where this happens," says lead author Adam Steel, a Neukom Fellow with the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in the Robertson Lab . "When you look at the location of the brain areas that process visual scenes and those that process spatial memories, these place-memory areas literally form a bridge between the two systems. Each of the brain areas involved in visual processing is paired with a place-memory counterpart." For the study, an innov