The discovery of the brains’ ‘internal GPS system” has earned three scientists the Nobel Prize of physiology or medicine.
The award will be shared between May-Britt Moser, Edvard Moser, and UK-based researcher John O’Keefe.
They discovered how the human brain determines where we are and how to navigate between locations, and may help explain why sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia cannot recognise their surroundings.
In 1971, Professor O’Keefe of University College London (UCL), found a set of nerve cells that became activated in rats whenever it was in a particular position in a room, and that a different set became activated whenever the rat was in a different location. These sets of cells in the hippocampus, located in the medial temporal lobe of the brain, were dubbed “place cells” by the scientist.
The husband and wife team of May-Britt and Edvard Moser from the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for the Biology of Memory (KI/CBM) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, discovered a different set of “grid cells” in 2005. These sets of cells help the brain determine distances and help people navigate the physical world,
The combination of the two discoveries were described by the Nobel committee as constituting “a comprehensive positioning system, an inner GPS, in the brain”.
The committee went on to explain the importance of the discovery, saying:
“A better understanding of neural mechanisms underlying spatial memory is therefore important and the discoveries of place and grid cells have been a major leap forward to advance this endeavour.”
