This is the best summary I could come up with:

The Scottish philosopher David Hume said that “Men are mightily governed by the imagination.” So too is the humble rat, according to research published Thursday in the journal Science.

Found in the hippocampus, a region that plays a major role in memory and imagination, this internal GPS system translates places and events into patterns of neurons firing, a sign that the brain cells are communicating.

Grid cells, the other important part of the GPS system, live in a deep brain area called the entorhinal cortex, which is located close to the hippocampus.

The experiments detailed in the Science paper required that scientists build from scratch machinery capable of reading and then translating the rat’s internal map, to determine what the rodent is thinking at one particular moment.

He told two of his eventual co-authors on the paper — his adviser Timothy Harris, a senior fellow, and Albert Lee, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator — that he had ideas that would allow them to test whether an animal can think.

The electrodes were then linked to a machine that would read the rat’s brain activity and learn the specific patterns generated as the rodent moved from one location to another.

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