Three Who Discovered Brain’s ‘Inner GPS’ - Won Nobel Prize in Medicine - 2014

A British-American scientist and a pair of Norwegian researchers were awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for discovering “an inner GPS in the brain” that enables virtually all creatures to navigate their surroundings.

John O’Keefe, 75, a British-American scientist, will share the prize of $1.1 million with May-Britt Moser, 51, and Edvard I. Moser, 52, only the second married couple to win a Nobel in medicine, who will receive the other half.

The three scientists’ discoveries “have solved a problem that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries — how does the brain create a map of the space surrounding us and how can we navigate our way through a complex environment?” said the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, which chooses the laureates.

The positioning system they discovered helps us know where we are, find our way from place to place and store the information for the next time, said Goran K. Hansson, secretary of the Karolinska’s Nobel Committee.

The researchers documented that certain cells are responsible for the higher cognitive function that steers the navigational system.

Dr. O’Keefe began using neurophysiological methods in the late 1960s to study how the brain controls behavior and sense of direction. In 1971, he discovered the first component of the inner navigational system in rats. 

He identified nerve cells in the hippo campus region of the brain that were always activated when a rat was at a certain location.

Dr. O’Keefe was born in New York City to immigrant Irish parents and graduated from the City College of New York. 

In 1967, he earned a Ph.D. in physiological psychology at McGill University in Montreal, and then moved for post doctoral training to University College London, where he is now a professor of cognitive neuroscience.

In 2005, the Mosers discovered a second crucial component of the brain’s positioning system by identifying other nerve cells that permit coordination and positioning, and calling them grid cells. 

While mapping connections to the hippo campus in rats moving about a room in a laboratory, “they discovered an astonishing pattern of activity in a nearby part of the brain called the entorhinal cortex,” the Nobel committee said.

Mental Maps

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to researchers who discovered how specific brain cells help rats and other mammals build spatial maps of their environment.

When the rat passed multiple locations, the cells formed a hexagonal grid. Each cell activated in unique spatial patterns. Their research showed “how both ‘place’ and ‘grid’ cells make it possible to determine position and to navigate,”

The Mosers were born to nonacademic families in rural Norway. Although they went to the same high school, they did not know each other well until they were undergraduates at the University of Oslo. They married while still in college and are now professors at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. 

At one point they studied under Dr. O’Keefe as visiting scientists at University College London.

It said that knowledge about the brain’s positioning system may “help us understand the mechamism underpinning the devastating spatial memory loss” that affects people with Alzheimer’s disease.


The Nobel awards in physics, chemistry, literature and peace will be announced later this week. The economics prize will be announced next Monday.

The laureates traditionally receive their awards at a banquet in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the date on which Alfred Nobel, the prize’s creator and the inventor of dynamite, died in 1896.