Just as members of an orchestra need a conductor to stay on tempo, neurons in the brain need well-timed waves of activity to organize memories across time. In the hippocampus–the brain’s memory center–temporal ordering of the neural code is important for building a mental map of where you’ve been, where you are, and where you are going. Published on May 30 in Nature Neuroscience, research from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan has pinpointed how the neurons that represent space in mice stay in time.
