Fred Barbash, the editor of Morning Mix, is a former National Editor and London Bureau Chief for the Washington Post.
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Three who discovered ‘inner GPS’ win Nobel Prize in Medicine
Fred Barbash
Oc.t 6, 2014
hree scientists, including a husband-and-wife team, have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine for deciphering the mechanism in the brain that allows us to find our way around.
The three winners of the world’s most coveted medical research prize are John O’Keefe, who holds both U.S. and British citizenship and is director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Center in Neural Circuits and Behavior at University College London; May-Britt Moser, a professor of neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and Edward I. Moser of the same university.
All worked on different components of the same problem: how we “orient ourselves in space” and navigate, the Stockholm-based Nobel committee said in announcing the prize. The full statement is here.
O’Keefe was honored for finding a type of nerve cell in the brain area called the hippocampus in 1975 activated according to where a rat located itself in a room. O’Keefe “concluded that these ‘place cells’ formed a map of the room,” the committee said.
In 2005, the Mosers mapped the connections in the hippocampus as rats moved about a room. They “discovered an astonishing pattern of activity in a nearby part of the brain called the entorhinal cortex,” where certain cells activated as the rats moved past locations in a hexagonal grid.
The found that these “grid cells” comprised a system of coordinates that permitted spatial navigation.
Later research using brain imaging showed that the same system exists in humans. Patients with Alzheimer’s disease lose their way around because the particular areas of the brain are affected.
Said the committee: “The discovery of the brain’s positioning system represents a paradigm shift in our understanding of how ensembles of specialized cells work together to execute higher cognitive functions. It has opened new avenues for understanding other cognitive processes, such as memory, thinking and planning.”
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