It's amazing that pigeons, lobsters, turtles, and even rats don’t get lost on their way, and unlike humans, they don't need either mapquest or Google Maps or GPS to find their way home. This is because they have built-in GPS within themselves. These animals rely on and leverage Earth’s magnetic field for orientation and navigation. The neural source of magnetic sense in pigeons are now found to be the single cells that encode three key positioning factors: the direction of a magnetic field, its intensity, and its polarity (north or south). It's so amazing. Centuries ago, the pigeons were used in India to send messages across hundreds of miles. By understanding how the pigeons process the computing and mapping in the brain, one day that info can probably be used to imorove the spatial orientation in human brains. And some day in future, we may not need a GPS in the car, because that GPS will be within us, built-in and totally internal to guide us at all times.
Deodatta V. Shenai-Khatkhate