Given recent advances in teleportation, it's reassuring to know that the human brain's navigation system appears to work just fine when we're beamed from place to place.
People who experienced virtual teleportation in a video game were able to mentally navigate to known destinations without relying on visual information or perceived motion, according to a study published Thursday by the journal Neuron. And during "teleportation," their brains produced a distinctive electrical signal that's associated with navigation.
So if teleporters do start showing up, don't worry. "Our brain will be OK with that," says Arne Ekstrom, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis and the study's senior author.
The study was part of an effort to understand the role of a distinctive low-frequency electrical oscillation in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays an important role in navigation.
"There's been all these studies over decades trying to figure out what this signal does," says Lindsay Vass, a postdoctoral scholar at UC Davis and the study's lead author.
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