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The discoverer of the GPS in the brain
May Britt Moser is a neurophysiologist and
psychologist born in Norway in 1963.
The awareness of one's own location and how
to find the path from one place to another is
crucial for humans and other animals. In 2005,
the researcher discovered a cell type very close
to the hippocampus brain region which is key for
the determination of an organism's position in
space.
According to May Britt, the brain creates a map
of the space that surrounds us, and allows us to
navigate through a complex environment. She
found that a certain cell type in a rat's brain was
activated when it was in a particular part of a
room, and that other cells were activated when it
was in another part. These “position-cells”
cooperate among themselves giving the brain
information to appreciate distances, and form an
internal map, exact and precise, on its position
in space, so that one can move around it comfortably. Currently, these findings may help to
explain why Alzheimer's patients cannot recognize their surroundings.
In 2014 she was awarded the Nobel prize in
Medicine, shared with her husband Edvard
Moser, for their discovery of the cells that
constitute the brain's positioning system or the
"internal GPS of the brain", which makes our
orientation in space possible. May and Edvard
are the fifth marriage throughout history in
which both spouses get the Nobel prize.
May Britt Moser is today professor of neuroscience and director of the Centre for Neural
Computation in Trondheim.