This page is still being written.
Place Cells
A place cell is a neuron in the hippocampus that fires when an animal is in one particular place.
Part of an early, unfinished explainers project: very much under construction.
The short version
Place cells were found by recording a neuron's action potentials (Extracellular Electrophysiology (coming soon)) while tracking where the animal is (Behavior Tracking (coming soon)), then simply mapping one against the other: every spike is marked at the spot where the animal was. It's very cool how simple and neat that is. And what comes out is pretty mind-blowing once you think about it: the neuron seems to hold a "map" of locations in the outside world. Because that map is tied to the world rather than to the animal's own point of view (Egocentric vs Allocentric (coming soon)), it is a huge leap in what we can infer about what the brain is computing.
Builds on
Behavior Tracking (coming soon)Receptive FieldsHippocampus (coming soon)
Leads to
Bayesian Decoding (coming soon)Egocentric vs Allocentric (coming soon)Theta Sequences (coming soon)Replay (coming soon)
Used in my work
Wang 2015 theta sequencesLustig 2018 thesis TADSAgarwal 2026 weak theta place codes