GPS Nobel for discovering the brain – ElEspectador.com

<- Content ->

How do we know where we are and how we find the way to get from one place to another? How we may store that information to go the same place long after? Why did we lose (so easily) through the city in which we live or to vacation elsewhere

find the answer to questions like this, the Nobel Prize in Medicine this year was awarded to John O’Keefe, a researcher at University College London, and the marriage of Norwegian Edvard I. Moser and May-Britt Moser, director and co-director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience. These three scientists discovered, after several decades of work, how it operates the part of our brain that allows us to orient ourselves in space.

According to the statement issued by the organizers of the awards, “the discovery of the system positioning the brain represents a paradigm shift in our understanding of how sets of specialized cells work together to perform higher cognitive functions. “

In 1971, working with rats in his lab, O’Keefe noted a type of nerve cells in the hippocampus is always activated when a rat was in a certain place in a room while other cells were activated when the rat was elsewhere.

This discovery led to British researcher to propose a new theory related to these neurological “cell positioning” and its ability to form “maps” of places.

But it would be more than three decades since the discovery that in 2005 May-Britt and Edvard Moser añadieran an unknown part of our positioning system.

Together we identified another type of nerve cell, they named grid, or grid, which generates coordinates and allows precise positioning and pathfinding.

“I met O’Keefe in the seventies, when I was still a student and nobody believed in his theory of the hippocampus as a cognitive map,” said the newspaper El Pais Juan Lerma, director of the Institute of Neurosciences Alicante. “It is a true pioneer because currently many neuroscientists studying these neurons in place, partly because the techniques are much easier to study than thirty years ago,” he adds.

With these microelectrodes, “a very fine needle leading printed circuit “, one can measure the activity of hundreds of neurons in the hippocampus and unravel the cognitive map of the speaker in the seventies.

Adding the work of these three scientists has been possible to answer a question baffled philosophers and scientists for centuries: how our brain constructs maps of the places we live

?