Deciphering the Neural Code of Head Direction and Spatial Location
The Brandon Lab studies how the brain computes orientation and position during movement through space. This work focuses on head direction coding, reorientation, path integration, and the circuit mechanisms that allow internal spatial representations to remain coherent while adapting to new sensory information. The broader aim is to understand how brains maintain a stable sense of place and direction in a changing world.
Path integration
Head direction and reorientation
The head direction system provides a neural estimate of which way the animal is facing. The lab investigates how this system remains stable, how it responds when cues are shifted or conflicting, and how internal orientation signals are realigned to the environment. This work addresses a core problem in spatial neuroscience: how rigid internal codes maintain continuity while still updating when the world changes.
Circuit mechanisms
Using longitudinal recording, perturbation, anatomical tracing, and computational modeling, the lab examines how thalamic, cortical, and hippocampal circuits interact to support spatial orientation. This approach is designed to move beyond description and identify the specific circuit operations that stabilize, update, and realign internal maps.
Navigation cannot depend entirely on external landmarks. The Brandon Lab studies how internal estimates of movement and direction support orientation when visual cues are limited, absent, or unreliable. These experiments help define how the brain combines self-motion signals with sensory input to maintain a useful spatial representation.
Medial Entorhinal VIP-expressing interneurons receive input from Thalamic Anterior Dorsal Nucleus and are critical for spatial memory
Optogenetic silencing of medial septal GABAergic neurons disrupts grid cell spatial and temporal coding in the medial entorhinal cortex
Grid cell disruption in a mouse model of early Alzheimer’s disease reflects reduced integration of self-motion cues
A Characterization of the Electrophysiological and Morphological Properties of Vasoactive Intestinal Peptide (VIP) Interneurons in the Medial Entorhinal Cortex (MEC)
Related publications
Grid cells and path integration
Alignment of head direction system
Mapping the circuits of the navigation system
My team is investigating entorhinal grid cells, which are implicated in encoding spatial position through a grid-like mapping predicated on movement. Grids cells are known to aide a process called path integration, an innate ability to maintain knowledge of your position in space based on the integration or memory of your prior movements. Our research demonstrated the necessity of medial septum input for grid cell operation. Our current explorations are directed at determining how specific subcircuits within the medial septum—namely cholinergic, GABAergic, and glutamatergic— influence this representation. Initial experiments utilizing cell-specific optogenetic inactivation have underscored the significance of septal GABAergic inputs to the entorhinal cortex in the grid cell paradigm. This is further elucidated in our recent work (Robinson et al., biorxiv 2023), where we used optogenetics to inhibit MS-GABAergic neurons and found that this inhibition disrupts grid cell spatial periodicity and temporal coding, including theta phase precession. The effects persisted during short recovery periods, suggesting these neurons are crucial for maintaining grid cell functionality.
Our research has a keen emphasis on the head direction system, encompassing pathways from the vestibular nuclei through the thalamus to cortical regions processing spatial data. Notably, our recent findings on thalamic head direction cells (Ajabi et al., 2023 Nature), elucidate the correctional mechanisms whereby the system realigns itself upon an animal’s forced reorientation. This is achieved by a rotational activity across the head direction network, independent of the animal’s own movement, facilitated by a global inhibition across the network. The computational model we introduced posits that such direct and global inhibitory inputs enable the observed dynamism. My laboratory is committed to extending this research to identify the source of global inhibition and to further comprehend the system’s adaptability to navigational challenges like path integration and goal-directed behavior. We are pursuing experiments and computational modeling to elucidate how the spatial navigation system executes reorientation tasks, with early evidence indicating a mental rotation of two-dimensional spatial maps within the hippocampal CA1 region (unpublished, presented at SfN 2023).
It is posited that the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) receives its head direction (HD) coding primarily from the subicular complex due to the scarcity of direct thalamic projections to the MEC. Our research, utilizing rabies-mediated retrograde tracing in mice, reveals that axons from the anterodorsal nucleus (ADN) specifically connect to interneurons within the MEC. Notably, ADN axons demonstrate a preferential connection to Vasoactive Intestinal Peptide (VIP) interneurons—a class of cells whose involvement in the MEC's spatial processing has not been previously acknowledged (unpublished, presented at SfN 2023). These VIP interneurons also integrate signals from the hippocampus, subiculum, and retrosplenial cortex, highlighting their potential significance in spatial memory. By integrating behavioral analysis with cFos imaging and pharmacogenetic manipulation of VIP interneurons, we uncover their indispensable role in spatial memory processes, particularly in the context of detecting novel environments (unpublished, presented at SfN 2023).