Why should you know about 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine winners ‘Brain's Own GPS’
If you get up in the middle of the night, you can move around your house with considerable ease. It is not difficult for you to find your way from the kitchen to the bedroom even with your eyes closed. Is it because you are used to your house and are well versed with all the rooms and distances? Or do you leave a scent that navigates you to your destination? How do you navigate from one place to other?
Well, this decade old question just got a valid answer from the newest Nobel Prize winners John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard I. Moser.
These three neuroscientists, discovered cells that form a positioning system in the brain and make sure that we are not permanently lost.
The research dates back to 1971, when Dr. O’Keefe was studying the hippocampus, an area of the brain responsible for memory. He found out that damaging the hippocampus leads to amnesia in test patients. He was surprised when he confirmed that this area of the brain is in fact also a spatial system.
He connected electrodes to rat brains and let them move freely in a room. He observed that a certain nerve cells got activated when the rat was in a particular spot. To confirm this, he monitored the rat movement in a different part of the room where another set of cells got activated. When the rat circled back to the original position, the original set of cells was reactivated. These cells were not just registering the location but they were also mapping the entire place. Thus came into existence, the “place cells” where the memory of a place was stored as a specific nerve combination.
In 2005, this discovery inspired the Moser’s research greatly. The team of husband and wife was conducting similar experiments on rats. Along with nerve cells, the entorhinal cortex, a part of the rat brain was found to be activated when the animal passed by a known place. These cells together formed a grid that enabled the rat to navigate spatially and remember and register locations; thus forming a positioning system in its brain.
