John O’Keefe, May-Britt and Edvard Moser found how the brain creates a map to enable us to navigate our environment
British-US scientist John O’Keefe and married couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser from Norway have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the brain’s “inner GPS”.
The “place cells” and “grid cells” they discovered make it possible for our brains to work out where we are .
The Nobel Assembly said the discoveries show how the brain creates “a map of the space surrounding us and how we can navigate our way through a complex environment.” O’Keefe, of University College London, discovered the first component of this positioning system in 1971 when he found that a certain type of nerve cell was always activated when a rat was at a certain place in a room.
Thirty-four years later May-Britt and Edvard Moser, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, identified another type of nerve cell that generates a co-ordinate system for precise path-finding, the assembly said.
Read full story at The Guardian