Your brain is moving along the surface of the torus 🤯

Video Description

Shortform link: https://shortform.com/artem ===== 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: https://patreon.com/artemkirsanov ===== 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV-EMA5g288&t=158s Neural manifolds video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHj9uVmwA_0 🕒 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/10.1101/436352 (2018) doi:10.1101/436352. ===== 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/814124 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 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYCR0pQLd_U ) Icons by https://biorender.com/ B-roll footage by https://www.pexels.com/ ===== *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._