And the Nobel goes to...
Most people adamantly follow their favorite sports team or skim through People magazine to predict who the next Oscars will go to, but the Nobel Prizes will always remain my Super Bowl/Academy Awards/World Cup! On October 6th, the Nobel Assembly announced the winners of the Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which in my opinion (contrary to many others - the rest of them are great too!) is the coolest prize in town. So who won, you may ask?
Figure 1: Ice cold, BA knowledge smiths
The above team won for "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain". Many have been calling this the brain's "internal GPS". But what are these cells, and how do they work? Let's take a brief look at their prize winning research:
In 1971, John O'Keefe noticed something very interesting when he peered into the hippocampus of rats in his laboratory. When the rats would walk around the cage and stand in a certain place, certain neurons were activated. When the rats would move somewhere else, different neurons were activated. It became clear that the rat was building an internal map of its surroundings, which was quite easy to visualize by just looking at which neurons were firing. He called these neurons place cells, as they play a fundamental role in allowing the animal to understand where it exists in three dimensional space. Cool stuff! Note: this hasn't really been shown in primates yet, although I think it's safe to say that we also have a similar system!
Drs. Moser and Moser (they're married, isn't that adorable?) found that in a nearby part of the brain, the entorhinal cortex, certain neurons are activated when a rat runs over a particular spot in space. These spots constitute a grid that develops in this cortex, effectively forming a coordinate system that the rat can use to position itself. Hence, an internal GPS!
These discoveries show that even in processes that seem infinitely complex, science can always (eventually) tease apart the underlying mechanisms by which these processes occur. With initiatives like BRAIN here in the United States, I look forward to seeing the other secrets of the brain that continue to be unlocked!
*Bonus* Here's a wonderful graphical summary of the prize created by our friends at the Nobel Foundation put together! Illustration by Mattias Karlén.
