By studying the neurons inside rat brains, British neuroscientist Kathryn Jeffery has concluded that mammals most likely collapse the world into a two-dimensional map when navigating and calculating distances. Jeffrey's team enticed rats to climb up a spiral staircase while collecting electrical recordings from single cells. "The firing pattern encoded very little information about height. The finding adds evidence for the hypothesis that the brain keeps track of our location on a flat plane, which is defined by the way the body is oriented."