If you’re ever lost in Los Angeles, just head for the ocean to get your bearings. This advice works because running into the coast — or any other border — can reset an errant internal GPS system, a new study in mice suggests.
The results help explain how the brain maintains a high-fidelity map of the environment. Specialized brain cells called grid cells signal when an animal reaches certain locales — a discovery that garnered a Nobel Prize in 2014 (SN Online, 10/6/14). Boundaries help course-correct these cells when they go off track, researchers report April 16 in Neuron.
In the experiment, electrodes implanted in the brain monitored the behavior of grid cells as mice moved around in an expansive enclosure. As the mice traveled, grid cells began to throw off the animals’ internal maps by signaling at the wrong places. But encounters with walls set these off-course grid cells right, Kiah Hardcastle of Stanford University and colleagues found. (1)
It is the boundaries which determine the whole.
Only when we reach the limit can we know.
But the limit is never reached. We can only imagine we reach for it. We can only dream of getting there. What we know is that we will never know. Trapped into ignorance, we must choose to trust our inner instinct.
An instinct which tells us that we know. That we are somehow already at that boundary. (We imagine God as the perfect being. Could He be that boundary?) That we had been there once. And that we will be there again if we wish so…
Search for the limits of your thought.
Name them whatever you like.
It is there where your true existence comes from…
Zero.
Nothing.
Everything.
We cannot grasp God or infinity any more than an ant can understand what an skyscraper is.
It can only walk on the surface,and perhaps “conclude” it’s something big.
So we are left only with a hope that God is good towards the ants…
True… And try to be good ants… Although the idea of being an “ant” somehow diminishes the importance of being human. We are enlightened creatures with the ability to understand God and be part of Him…
Oh,I didn’t mean it that way (of course we know more than an ant does).
I liked the thought of us as ants because it makes us feel humble.
And in today’s world,I think there are more people that should be reminded of being more humble than being less humble…
In a way, we live in a two – dimensional world: inside a dichotomy between the boundery and the unlimited. We need to hit against the boundary ropes in order to bounce into the infinite. We come from there and it is there that we’re all heading to.
Seems so, indeed… 😉