Grid cells and neural coding in high-end cortices

Abstract

An ultimate goal of neuroscience is to understand the mechanisms of mammalian intellectual functions, many of which are thought to depend extensively on the cerebral cortex. While this may have been considered a remote objective when Neuron was launched in 1988, neuroscience has now evolved to a stage where it is possible to decipher neural-circuit mechanisms in the deepest parts of the cortex, far away from sensory receptors and motoneurons. In this review, we show how studies of place cells in the hippocampus and grid cells in the entorhinal cortex may provide some of the first glimpses into these mechanisms. We shall review the events that led up to the discovery of grid cells and a functional circuit in the entorhinal cortex and highlight what we currently see as the big questions in this field--questions that, if resolved, will add to our understanding of cortical computation in a general sense.