Hippocampal Codes for Real-World Human Navigation

As animals move through the world, the hippocampus represents their location, direction, and speed. Parallel studies in humans have been mostly limited to virtual navigation because of physical constraints of suitable neural recording technologies. However, there are known differences between real-world and virtual navigation, leaving open the question of how the hippocampus supports real-world navigation in humans. Here we report evidence from ambulatory patients with chronic brain implants that the location, direction, and speed of humans walking along a linear track are represented in local field potentials from the hippocampus. We further show in a subset of patients who were tested twice after long delays that these representations can be reliable over time. These findings provide the first demonstration of multiple, stable neural codes for real-world navigation in the human hippocampus.