Your brain is moving along the surface of the torus 🤯
Shortform link:
https://shortform.com/artem
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My name is Artem, I'm a neuroscience PhD student at Harvard University.
🌎 Website and Social links: https://kirsanov.ai/
📥 "Receptive Field" neuro-newsletter: https://artemkirsanov.substack.com/
✨ Support me on Patreon to get access to Discord community: / artemkirsanov
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In this video we will explore a very interesting paper published in Nature in 2022, which describes the hidden torus in the neuronal activity of cells in the entorhinal cortex, known as grid cells.
Place cell video: • Place cells: How your brain creates maps o...
Neural manifolds video: • Neural manifolds - The Geometry of Behaviour
🕒 OUTLINE:
00:00 Introduction
00:48 Shortform message
01:41 Disclaimer
02:32 Grid cells & modules
04:48 How data was acquired
05:38 Toroidal coordinates
06:40 Invariance of the torus
07:43 Continuous attractor network
08:10 Outro
📚 FURTHER READING & REFERENCES:
1. Gardner, R. J. et al. Toroidal topology of population activity in grid cells. Nature 602, 123–128 (2022).
2. Pisokas, I., Heinze, S. & Webb, B. The head direction circuit of two insect species. eLife 9, e53985 (2020).
3. Shilnikov, A. L. & Maurer, A. P. The Art of Grid Fields: Geometry of Neuronal Time. Front. Neural Circuits 10, (2016).
4. Moser, M.-B., Rowland, D. C. & Moser, E. I. Place Cells, Grid Cells, and Memory. Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol 7, a021808 (2015).
5. Lewis, M., Purdy, S., Ahmad, S. & Hawkins, J. Locations in the Neocortex: A Theory of Sensorimotor Object Recognition Using Cortical Grid Cells. http://biorxiv.org/lookup/doi/10.1101... (2018) doi:10.1101/436352.
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Special thanks to Crimson Ghoul for providing English subtitles!
Footage of mouse running on a torus: Helmet and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia...
Thumbnail illustration: by Helmet and the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience
Some video footage taken from: "Edvard and May-Britt Moser: A journey into entorhinal cortex" by NTNU University ( • Edvard and May-Britt Moser: A journey into... )
Icons by https://biorender.com/
B-roll footage by https://www.pexels.com/
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Disclaimer: This channel is my personal project. The views and content expressed here are my own and are separate from my research role at Harvard University.
#neuroscience #topology #gridcells
Description remastered: February 2026. Links & Bio updated; original context preserved.