From Reuters:
(Reuters) - Anglo-American John O'Keefe and Norwegian couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser won the 2014 Nobel Prize for medicine on Monday for discovering the brain's internal positioning system, helping humans find their way and giving clues to how strokes and Alzheimer's affect the brain.
The Nobel Assembly, which awarded the prize of 8 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million) in an announcement at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, said the discovery 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?"
Ole Kiehn, a Nobel committee member and professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institute, said the three scientists had found "an inner GPS that makes it possible to know where we are and find our way".
O´Keefe, now director at the center in neural circuits and behavior at University College London, discovered the first component of the positioning system in 1971 when he found that a type of nerve cell in a brain region called the hippocampus was always activated when a rat was in a certain place in a room....MORE
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