Why We Never Get Lost in the Grocery Store (Until They Rearrange It)

We all have that one store, mine was the Reliance Fresh near my place in Delhi. After enough trips, I didn’t need a shopping list or even to look at the aisles. My legs just knew where the bread was. Turn left after the dairy, take two steps past the Maggi shelf, and voilà, instant success. But when I returned home during my break, something had changed. The layout. The vibe. The logic of the place. Suddenly, I was lost in a space I used to know like the back of my hand. Why? Well, we can thank, or rather question, our place cells and grid cells for that.

Place Cells: The Loyal Locators

Deep in our hippocampus, place cells are like loyal memory-keepers. They fire when we’re in specific locations within an environment. Not just any place, the bread corner of the store, our favorite window seat in class, or that shady tree in the park. They work by associating a unique pattern of neural activity with a particular spatial context. So every time I returned to Reliance, my place cells said, “Ah yes, this exact spot! Welcome back to the potato chip aisle.” But here’s the twist: they rely heavily on consistent cues in the environment: layout, lighting, smells, even sounds. So when the store was rearranged, the visual and spatial cues were all scrambled. My place cells panicked a little. They were like, “Wait… wasn’t this the paneer section yesterday?”

Grid Cells: The Brain’s Graph Paper

Enter the grid cells, located in the entorhinal cortex, right next to the hippocampus. These cells don’t care much about what’s where, they care about how far we’ve moved. They form a kind of internal hexagonal map, firing in a regular grid pattern as we move through space. So while place cells say “We’re at the banana shelf,” grid cells say “We’ve walked 3.6 meters northeast.” Think of them as the brain’s version of graph paper, laying out coordinates regardless of what objects occupy them.

Why We Get Lost

When both systems are in sync, navigation is smooth. But when the familiar cues tied to place cells are disrupted, grid cells are left doing the heavy lifting; and without familiar “landmarks” to latch onto, our internal map stutters. We end up wandering the aisles like confused archaeologists. That’s why the space felt familiar, but I couldn’t pinpoint anything, like walking through a dream-version of the store.

Brains Love Consistency (But Hate When Things Get Rearranged)

This combo of place and grid cells explains a lot more than store layouts: why we can walk to class on autopilot but get lost when there’s construction, or why a rearranged room feels emotionally “off” even if everything is still there, or why memories feel spatial: tied to exact places, not just facts.

Final Aisle

So the next time you feel irrationally betrayed by a newly renovated grocery store, don't blame yourself. Thank your hippocampus and entorhinal cortex for caring enough to build a mental map at all.
And maybe give them some time to recalibrate before the next grocery run. Because honestly, who moved the jam next to the shampoo?