The bat’s brain is born for navigation

They found that during random exploration and goal-oriented navigation, such as during foraging tasks, bats maintain a detailed spatial memory of the environment and their path. Experiments also show that bats also have spatial awareness of future locations.

“Our neurons all fire at the same time, but represent different parts of a larger path,” Dotson said. “So it represents the past, present, and future, not just the present.”

Being able to map their location using this natural GPS system is one of the greatest survival tools for bats, helping them find food and avoid predators.

Research points out that different species may weigh the correlation of past, present, and future experiences in different ways. For example, in survival scenarios such as “monkeys jumping between branches or humans driving cars or skiing downhill at high speed”, future information may be the most important for survival.

Melville Volgmut, a researcher at the University of Arizona Bat Laboratory, said: “Bats must plan locally in time and in the future to succeed in their hunting behavior.” “These are also brain processes related to our lives.”

For a long time, studying species other than humans has been a hallmark of neuroscience. Studying the hippocampus of bats can give scientists a deeper understanding of how certain diseases affect our own brains.

For example, learning more about bats may change our perception of Alzheimer’s disease-Alzheimer’s disease is a brain disease that slowly destroys cognitive function and memory. People with Alzheimer’s disease have difficulty navigating a new route or location intuitively, even if they have encountered it several times.