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.