The Brain’s GPS

The Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine has been awarded this year to researchers who literally traced the Brain’s GPS. They are John O´Keefe, May‐Britt Moser and Edvard Moser. The latter duo are a husband wife team who have spent years exploring the work of O’ Keefe from the 1970s.

O’ Keefe found in experiments with rats that a certain part of the brain called the hippocampus would signal each time the rat was in a specific area. Different cells corresponded to different areas in the rat’s domain. He called these place cells. They literally pinpointed the place the rat was at.

When some thirty years later May‐Britt and Edvard Moser began exploring these neurons they found that another set of cells in a neighboring part of the brain, the entorhinal cortex, worked as grid cells. These worked like the grids on a map allowing a person to find a specific area of interest.

It is the combination of the place cells and grid cells in the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex that allows human beings to move from where they are to where they want to be, much like how a GPS helps a car in the same manner. This science project has thrown light on how we navigate.