We are free to wander, but usually when we go somewhere it’s for a reason. In a new study, researchers at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT show that as we pursue life’s prizes, a region of the brain tracks our location with an especially strong predilection for the location of the reward. This pragmatic bias of the lateral septum (LS) suggests it’s a linchpin in formulating goal-directed behavior. “It appears that the lateral septum is, in a sense, ‘prioritizing’ reward-related spatial information,” says Hannah Wirtshafter, lead…
