Discovering brain’s GPS

Three scientists, including a husband-and-wife team, have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in medicine for deciphering the mechanism in the brain that allows us to find our way around.

The three winners of the world’s most coveted medical research prize are John O’Keefe, who holds both U.S. and British citizenship and is director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Center in Neural Circuits and Behaviour at University College London; May-Britt Moser, a professor of neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Edward I Moser of the same university.

According to a statement, this year's laureates have discovered a positioning system in the brain called "inner GPS" that makes it possible to orient ourselves in space, demonstrating a cellular basis for higher cognitive function- solved a problem that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries.

For hundreds of years, questions about how humans understand their location in their environment, and how they develop a sense of distance, have intrigued scientists and philosophers alike. It was 20th-century advances in psychology and neuroscience that allowed researchers to probe their questions experimentally.

The Nobel winners’ work provides such a fundamental insight into the brain that many neuroscientists are hopeful that the discovery will one day help us find treatments for a host of neurological conditions.