Discovery of the brain’s “inner GPS” system

Yeah that's right "Discovery of the brain’s “inner GPS” system". In 2014 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard Moser for their discovery of the brain’s “inner GPS” system. What they discovered is place cells and grid cells — special neurons in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex of animals (including humans, monkeys, and rats) , these cells appear to create a cognitive map of every room or space that you’ve ever explored. So when you move around a room or space, a very specific place cell fires — and when you visit the same place again in the future, the same place cell fires every time.

O’Keefe and Jonathan Dostrovsky discovered that the rat hippocampus had special place cells that, as their name suggests, are specifically involved with the rat’s current place in 1971.Before that we only knew that the hippocampus was deeply involved with memory and learning, but the specificity of place cells and the cognitive spatial map they constructed was groundbreaking work. Later work has shown that there really are specific pyramidal neurons that fire in a certain pattern when an animal (rat, human, etc.) is in a specific place.


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