#DR_RONIT_SHARMA WATCH: Nobel Prize for medicine rewarded for brain GPS discovery. The Nobel Prize in medicine has been awarded to three scientists who discovered that certain cells in our brains help us to map and navigate our surroundings. John OKeefe, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard I. Moser were yesterday awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for their discovery that certain types of cells in our brains can form a coordinate system to help us map and memorise our surroundings. For OKeefe, a professor at the University College of London in the UK, the $1.1 million award (split three ways), was a long time coming, having made his contribution to the discovery way back in 1971. According to Amar Toor at the Verge, OKeefe identified what he called ‘place cells’ in the hippocampus region of the brains of rats, some of which would be activated when the rats moved to one area of their enclosure, and others when they moved somewhere else. O’Keefe suggested that these place cells were establishing a map of the space the rats were in, and were recording this in their memories. More than three decades later, husband and wife team, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, continued O’Keefe’s research by discovering in 2005 what they called ‘grid cells’. These are a different type of nerve cell that create what is essentially a coordinate system in the rats’ brains, just like the one a GPS uses. These cells are located in the entorhinal cortex, near the hippocampus, and were activated when the rats moved through paths,” says Toor at the Verge. The hexagonal grid cells work together with place cells to form a comprehensive positioning system that allow for recognition and navigation of environments.” The team was also able to show that similar processes are going on inside human brains, and with this in mind, researchers are now better equipped to understand what’s happening in the brains of people suffering from Alzheimers disease. This is because Alzheimer’s affects both the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex of a persons brain, and has a particularly devastating effect on their ability to recognise and navigate their surroundings. MUST SHARE THIS VALUABLE DISCOVERY TO AWARE PEOPLE.
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 08:40:28 +0000
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