Nobel Prize Awarded for Decoding Geometrical Pattern of Brain's Spatial Awareness

October 6, 2014 | Nature News provides an absorbing profile of May-Britt and Edvard Moser, the Norwegian neuroscientists who today received the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with former supervisor John O'Keefe, for their discovery of "grid cells" in the brain's entorhinal cortex. Through years of successive experiments with rats in their Kavli Institute in Trondheim, the Mosers have demonstrated that these grid cells fire in overlapping hexagonal patterns that correspond to an animal's position in physical space, producing a sense of orientation and direction. This simple and elegant geometrical pattern has stood out as a major surprise in the still-nascent field of neuroscience. Nature News