But dendrites can store information about the past and make predictions about the future independently of the cell body, according to a new study. Dendritic activity can dissociate from cell body activity, depending on an animal’s goal, the new work shows. But when the entire virtual environment changed, dendrites were the first to encode new locations of rewards—the cell body caught up later. When the reward location changed, dendrites located closer to the cell body, whose activity coupled tightly to somatic activity, remapped faster than those farther away. But when a mouse encountered a totally new environment, distal dendrites learned the new spatial code first, and the cell body and proximal dendrites adopted this code later on.