Announcement of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine / Reuters Live
Researchers John O’Keefe and marriage May-Britt and Edvard Moser have received the Nobel Prize in medicine today to discover cells that make up the positioning system in the human brain.
The work of the three researchers reveals neurons that help us “know where we are and where we want to go”, as summarized today one of the members of Committee that awards an annual prize. The British-American neuroscientist O’Keefe gets half of the prize and the Norwegian Edvard and May-Britt Moser, husband and wife shared the other half of the award. This is the fifth marriage to win this prestigious award.
The winners have discovered internal “our GPS” within the brain and the detailed structure shown at the cellular level is the basis for complex cognitive functions, said the I Nobel committee in the news Prize announcement
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The winners have discovered “our GPS ‘internal within the brain
John O’Keefe, professor of neuroscience at University College London in 1971 discovered a type of nerve cells which are alternately activated when a rat was in either an interior point . It was the first positioning neurons were observed and were responsible for making a “map room”. These “place cells” were in the hippocampus, the brain region that gets its name from having shaped seahorse. The hippocampus is one of the better preserved primitive brain and inner parts, and makes perfect sense because the orientation and positioning are essential to understand the environment and avoid ending up being eaten by a predator.
“I met O’Keefe in the seventies, when I was still a student, and his theory of the hippocampal cognitive map is not believed anyone,” explains Juan Lerma, director of the Neuroscience Institute of Alicante. “It is a true pioneer,” says, because currently many neuroscientists studying these neurons in place, in part because the techniques to study are “much easier than thirty years ago,” he adds. With microelectrodes, “a very fine needles that are printed circuits”, one can measure the activity of hundreds of neurons in the hippocampus and unravel the cognitive map of the speaker in the seventies.
In 2005 the work of O’Keefe was vindicated when the marriage Moser discovered a new component of the GPS cerebral. It was the “red cells”, an interconnected system of neurons that determine the position and help us find a certain way. Edvard and May-Britt Moser, currently working at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, also showed how place cells described by O’Keefe and interpenetrating network to determine the position and help the individual bearings.
“In the seventies, the theory of the hippocampus as a cognitive map is not nobody believed her”
The findings of these three researchers have said those responsible for the award, they have helped answer a question that has haunted philosophers and scientists for centuries: how the brain creates a map of the space around us and how we helps move through a complex environment
The findings of the three Nobel Laureates were made in animals, but more recently they have also uncovered evidence that there is a similar system in the human brain. Thanks to new brain imaging techniques to study and patients who needed surgery on the brain has shown that our brain has these place cells and grid making up the internal GPS. Grid cells discovered by Moser found in another area of the brain called the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus communicates with the system to work properly. In patients with Alzheimer these two areas of the brain are damaged and therefore patients have trouble getting around and become lost. The study of these brain networks, says the Committee, may now help explain how this disease causes a “devastating loss of memory.”
The discovery of positioning in the brain is “a paradigm shift” to understand how a group of specialized cells that are responsible for complex cognitive tasks and “opens the way” to understand the memory, thinking and ability to plan, the Committee added.
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