Shirdhankar et al. establish a method to record from single neurons in the brain of African mole-rats while they are head-fixed or freely moving, performing natural behaviors. The method allows the study of sensory perception and neural adaptations of these strictly subterranean rodents, well known for their longevity, cancer resistance, and magnetic sense.

Neuroscience; Molecular neuroscience; Systems neuroscience; Sensory neuroscience

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The brain’s neural compass seems 2D, detecting only left and right head-turns. However, if the head is tilted in 3D, its rotation around the vertical axis also covertly changes its horizontal facing ...

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The hippocampus exhibits a CA3-to-CA1 coding transformation that combines fast learning with an efficient, compressed neural code.

Neurons in medial entorhinal cortex collectively represent discrete nonlocal positions during immobility. During this nonlocal coding, CA1 is uncoupled from entorhinal cortex. These representations ar...

Spatial attention supports navigation by prioritizing information from selected locations. A candidate neural mechanism is provided by theta-paced sweeps in grid- and place-cell population activity, which sample nearby space in a left-right-alternating pattern coordinated by parasubicular direction signals. During exploration, this alternation promotes uniform spatial coverage, but whether sweeps can be flexibly tuned to locations of particular interest remains unclear. Using large-scale Neuropixels recordings in freely-behaving rats, we show that sweeps and direction signals are rapidly and dynamically modulated: they track moving targets during pursuit, precede orienting responses during immobility, and reverse during backward locomotion — without prior spatial learning. Similar modulation occurs during REM sleep. Canonical head-direction signals remain head-aligned. These findings identify sweeps as a flexible, attention-like mechanism for selectively sampling allocentric cognitive maps. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, Synergy Grant 951319 (EIM) The Research Council of Norway, Centre of Neural Computation 223262 (EIM, MBM), Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex 332640 (EIM, MBM), National Infrastructure grant (NORBRAIN, 295721 and 350201) The Kavli Foundation, https://ror.org/00kztt736 Ministry of Science and Education, Norway (EIM, MBM) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences; NTNU, Norway (AZV)

Abstract. Ansell's mole-rat (Fukomys anselli) is an African rodent known for its subterranean lifestyle and unique phenotypic traits, including extreme lon

Mole-rats are subterranean rodents that have evolved remarkable sensory adaptations to life in underground tunnel systems, yet their neural mechanisms remain largely unexplored. Here, we present a pro...

She was a tireless advocate for conservation, the welfare of captive chimpanzees and the protection of habitats.

A systems-level understanding of cortical computation requires insight into how neural codes are transformed across distinct brain circuits. In the mammalian cortex, one of the few systems where such ...