Lost often? Your 'brain GPS' at fault

Do you often get disoriented or lost while trying to find a way through the city streets? Well simply blame it on your brain.

Researchers in Britain have found that two key parts of the brain "talk" to each other and allow people to remember routes as well as plan new ones, but if either of these is not working, the ability to find the way around gets impaired.

While the first part called the hippocampus stores memories about key locations and landmarks, the other brain cells, known as grid cells, provide the internal sense of space and distance, like a GPS system.

According to the researchers, in those people who get lost easily, navigation cells are less efficient at talking to each other, so they get lost. "People who get lost easily don't make good use of their grid cells. These provide us with information about distance, movement and direction while linking to memories about specific landmarks. For each location a specific pattern of cells will send signals to trigger a particular memory.

"For example the entrance to Top Shop on your local high street will have one pattern while another will trigger a memory of St Pancras station. By talking to each other in this way, the cells allow the brain to produce a route it has to follow," lead researcher Dr Hugo Spiers of University College London was quoted by The Sunday Telegraph as saying.

According to them, training the cells can help people navigate more easily and it may explain how a city's cabbies gain the encyclopedic "knowledge" of the roads.