A recent study conducted by the scientists at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel found out that bats and other few other animals possess a biological compass in their brain that helps them navigate correctly.

Author of study Arseny Finkelstein and colleagues focused on the dorsal presubiculum of the Egyptian fruit bat. They attached wireless devices to measure the brain activity of bats crawling around in search of food, and also measured which way the bats were moving in three dimensions, so they could correlate the bat’s actions with its brain activity. They also monitored bats flying toward a perch where they would land head-down.

 After an analysis of the brain activity, the researchers noticed certain cells in the bat’s brain responded according to horizontal  or vertical orientation of the bat when it moved. They concluded that, the cells helped the bats track their orientation in all three dimensions of space. A computer scan of the bat’s brain found out that the particular  head-direction cells had a toroidal shape — somewhat  like the shape of a thick donut.  They dubbed the particular cells as “3-D neural compass.”

The researchers mentioned that other animals might also have neural compasses similar to the ones in the bat. More work has to be done to describe similar systems in other mammals, but the researchers think they’re likely not limited to bats.

“We predict that conjunctive 3-D head-direction cells might be found also in non-flying mammals that move in complex 3-D environments or that orient their head up/down, such as squirrels, cats, dolphins and primates,” they write.