Thalamocortical processing of the head-direction sense

•The Head-Direction (HD) thalamocortical system shares many similarities with other primary sensory modalities.•Neuronal firing in the HD system in relation to behavior is easily tractable.•Monitoring of HD cell ensembles in vivo has revealed that the organization of neuronal activity is invariant to brain states.•Information flow is also independent of brain states, from the thalamus to the cortex.•These subcortical and highly organized inputs during sleep may play a key role in hippocampal replay and memory consolidation.•The HD system is a promising model to explore the dynamics of thalamocortical networks and its contribution to navigation and memory just start to be unveiled.