Nobel in Medicine Awarded for Discovery of “Inner GPS”
October 6, 2014
Three scientists who discovered how virtually all creatures, including people, know where they are in their environment and how they find their way from place to place have won the 2014 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Half of the $1.1-million prize was awarded to British-American physiological psychologist John O’Keefe, director of the Sainsbury Welcome Centre in Neural Circuits and Behaviour at University College London. The other half of the prize was awarded to the Norwegian wife-and-husband team of psychologist May-Britt Moser, director of the Centre For Neural Computation, and neurophysiologist Edvard Moser, director of the Kavli Insitute for Systems Neuroscience, both at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. The Nobel Committee said the scientists had “discovered an ‘inner GPS‘ in the brain that makes it possible to orient ourselves in space,” demonstrating that brain cells are involved in our ability to know and perceive the world.
O’Keefe discovered the first component of that system–nerve cells that he named place cells–while using rats to study how the brain controls behavior. He found that these cells, located in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, fired (become activated) when a rat was at a specific place in a “room.” Other place cells fired when the rat was at other places. The cells, O’Keefe concluded, created a map of the room.
The Mosers discovered the second component of the navigational system–another type of nerve cell called grid cells–in a nearby region of the brain called the entorhinal cortex. These cells fired when the rat passed certain locations in the room, forming a hexagonal grid that allowed for spatial navigation (purposeful movements within a certain space). More recent studies of the human brain using brain imaging techniques and in neurosurgery have revealed that both place cells and grid cells exist there as well.
The Nobel Committee said the scientists’ work in discovering the brain’s positioning system marks a major shift in the understand of how groups of brain cells work together to perform such major cognitive functions as making and recalling memories, thinking, and planning. The research has helped other scientists trying to gain a better understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions that affect cognitive functions. Patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease often lose their ability to find their way and fail to recognize even familiar environments.
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