Nobel Prize Win for the discovering brain’s ‘GPS’

Nobel Prize Win for the discovering brain’s ‘GPS’

The Nobel Prize win for physiology or medicine has been awarded to three scientist who discovered the brain’s  “GPS system”.

 

American-British researcher Prof John O’Keefe and Norwegian scientists May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser won the Nobel Prize.

They discovering the “inner GPS” in the brain that helps us navigate through the world.

 Their finding in rats and scientist suggests that human have the same system in their brains-represented a  “paradigm shift” in the knowledge of how cell work together.

 That knowing about the brain’s positioning system may “help us understand the mechanism underpinning the devastating spatial memory loss that affects people with Alzheimer’s disease.

 Brain “Inner GPS”

Prof O’Keefe, from University College London, discovered the first part of the brain’s internal positioning system in 1971.

1971 when he found that a certain type of nerve cell was always activated in rat was at a certain place in a room. That these “place cells” were building up a map of the environment.

34 years later, in 2005, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser, husband and wife team at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, identified another type of nerve cell-the “grid cell”.

These “grid cells” are akin to lines of longitude and longitude, helping the brain to judge distance and navigate.

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Prof May-Britt Moser said: “This is crazy, this is such a great honor for all of us and all the people who have worked with us and supported us”.