Can anyone in this rough field even comment on the long term benefits of such research? And why this needs to be in Cell? I’ve tried my best to attend as many neuroscience talks about work like this regarding place cells etc and keep walking out of them scratching my head what the point is in the long term.
Grid cells and place cells are among the very few examples where we actually know what a population of neurons is doing. This is exciting for at least two reasons:
1. If we know what the neurons do, we can start trying to understand how they do it. Like at the circuit level. And if we can figure that out, this will very likely help us figure out what other neurons are doing and how their circuits work. Currently very little is understood.
2. There's a lot of speculation that grid cells are also used for higher-level cognition, to represent relations between more abstract things. This is one of the two main theses of '1000 Brains' by neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins.
Why are these two things interesting? Well wouldn't it be cool to understand how the brain works? It might help us build AI that learns as fast as we do (chat GPT was trained on more text than one could read in many lifetimes). It might help us augment our own intelligence. These are very long-term goals of course, but understanding grid and place cells seems like a reasonable starting point.
You can't see the point of elucidating the nuances of the way the brain encodes the information around us? Surely even if you see no value in basic science of this nature in and of itself (in my opinion a mistake) there are myriad application-based reasons to understand how the brain works, including both medical progress and the brain's influence on artificial intelligence designs.
To clarify, I did my PhD in an immunology department in a top US grad school, and I attended the talks by the actual authors of some of these seminal works in the neuroscience department next door. My question was not an indictment on all basic neuroscience but a request for clarification on how this particular mode of questioning (pointing out that there are grid cells or time and place cells) is productive in us figuring out our brains.
Not an expert, but one application of neural decoding you may be aware of is brain machine interfaces (eg Neuralink). By decoding motor intent we can create devices which offer movement to paraplegic individuals with external robotics. Decoding neuronal activity in other parts of the brain could allow us to directly interface with other neural functions. Imagine a machine that could interpret your perception of space or time (or even modify it).
Another application is in computing. Advances in the understanding of neuroscience have stimulated the creation of artificial neural networks (for example, the convolutional neural network was inspired by the cat visual cortex). Understanding how the human brain encodes concepts such as time or space might help us to design artificial systems.
Finally, the most important aspect of this work is (imo) advancing basic science. We don't understand how the brain works, and work such as this brings us closer to solving the grand mystery of neuroscience.
