Discovery of brain's 'inner GPS' earns trio Nobel Prize for medicine

US-British scientist John O'Keefe and Norwegian scientists May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser won the Nobel Prize for medicine yesterday for discovering the "inner GPS" in the brain that helps us navigate through the world.

Their findings in rats - and research suggests that humans have the same system in their brains - represented a "paradigm shift" in the knowledge of how cells work together to perform cognitive functions, the Nobel Assembly said, adding that knowing about the brain's positioning system may "help us understand the mechanism underpinning the devastating spatial memory loss" that affects people with Alzheimer's disease.

"This year's Nobel Laureates have discovered a positioning system, an 'inner GPS' in the brain, that makes it possible to orient ourselves in space," the assembly said.

O'Keefe, 75, of University College London, discovered the first component of this system in 1971 when he found that a certain type of nerve cell was always activated when a rat was at a certain place in a room.

He demonstrated that these "place cells" were building up a map of the environment, not just registering visual input.

Thirty-four years later, in 2005, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser, a married couple at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, identified another type of nerve cell - the "grid cell" - that generates a coordinate system for precise positioning and path-finding, the assembly said.

"This is crazy," an excited May-Britt Moser, 51, said from Trondheim. She said her 52-year-old husband didn't immediately find out about the prize because he was flying to the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany, to demonstrate their research.