Dream You Can't Find Your Car? Now Not Thought a Sign of Impending Alzheimer's
I had it again last night. The dream where I park my car, then go back to find it and it's gone. I wander around and around but never find it again. Now a new study has me thinking I'm developing Alzheimer's. Well, not really. But researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have induced this all-too-common human experience – or a close version of it – permanently in rats and from what is observed, hope they can perhaps derive clues about why strokes and Alzheimer's disease can destroy a person’s sense of direction, according to newswise.com. Scientists have developed a micro-surgical procedure that makes it possible to remove the area of the rat’s brain that contains grid cells and show what happens to this hard-wired navigational system when these grid cells are wiped out. One effect, not surprisingly, is that the rats become very poor at tasks requiring internal map-making skills, such as remembering the location of a resti