(Dagbladet): Today it was announced that the couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser is awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his brain research.
They are respectively chairman and vice chairman at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at NTNU. At the recent 20 years, led the work on memory research in rats and mice.
Inner GPS
800 rats and mice running around at the Kavli Centre in order to show how the brain’s “inner GPS” works.
In 2005, the couple discovered Moser grid cells or grid cells in the brain. These treats memory and sense of place. Psychology professors had discovered the brain’s coordination system. It was the first time it was possible to associate a mental function directly to activities at the cellular level in the brain.
– This is amazing, incredibly gratifying and very well deserved, says Johan Frederik Storm, a neuroscientist at the University of Oslo, Faculty of Medicine.
He was part of the same environment as the couple Moser while working on her doctoral dissertation, and they also later had some joint projects.
– Moser has discovered a new phenomenon. The brain forms very own patterns that we use to orient ourselves. This system is abstract and unconscious, and only indirectly related to the external world, says Storm.
He says this is very basic research, which changes our understanding of how the brain works.
This brain research can, uncovering nerve cell function, have great significance for research on Alzheimer’s disease.
Brain researchers Moser was based on his mentor, American John Michael O Keefe’s research. O? Keefe also receives now Nobel Prize in Medicine along with Edvard and May-Britt Moser.
The brain map
In 1971 discovered O Keefe at University College London that specific nerve cells in the hippocampus responds to specific places, writes NTNU on its website. He saw how the sites were recorded in the brain when the rats moved from place to place. It indicated that the cells could form a virtual map of the animal’s location.
The couple Moser received in 1996 an insight into this knowledge and passed it down the Kavli Centre in Trondheim. In 2005 discovered Moser-grupa cells in a part of the cortex, entorhinal cortex region of rat brains. This serves as a navigation system.
– It is amazing that we do not go away; has May-Britt Moser stated to Nature.
These grid cells are the brain’s internal GPS that tells where we are, where we have been and where we are going. Grid cells are later found in a variety of animal species, including humans.
In the early stages of alzheimer’s area in the brain where grid cells are often damaged. Therefore, the Nobel Prize winner’s research on memory and cognitive abilities are lost, have great significance for research on Alzheimer’s disease.
The key to memory
The couple Moser since the discovery of grid cells examined how they interact with the rest of the brain. To find out how grid cells seems, may contain the key to understanding how memories are stored and also how they are lost. The memory is often connected to our sense of place, and many imagine instead they got the information before they remember what it contains.
Brain research now has its golden age. Researchers in Norway are strong, as seen in an international context, says neuroscientist Storm at UIO.
– The brain is the most complex of our knowledge of the universe. The field has matured and important technological advances now make it possible to make big strides, says Storm.
The brain can be compared to a computer. It has its own operating system.
– The brain can be compared to a computer, but is far more complicated than computers, and much more complicated one previously believed. Previously it was believed that a single brain cell was almost like a single transistor, which can be switched on and off, but now we know that each cell is almost like a computer in itself, says Storm.
Equal rats
The brains of rats and humans are very similar, says neuroscientist Storm. Research on rats brain can therefore be easily transmitted to humans.
– Over 95 percent of the functions and mechanisms are very similar in our brain and rat brain. The basic mechanisms of all mammals are quite similar, as are such things as language exists only in humans, as well, says Storm.
– It is not inconceivable that in the future will also find other specialized cells in other parts of the cortex that controls like abstract mental processes which, says Storm.
In December last year won Edvard and May-Britt Moser Horwitzprisen, awarded by Columbia University in New York. Previously, the 43 winners Horwitzprisen, of 91 total, later received the Nobel Prize.
It is ten years since Norway last won the Nobel Prize, as Finn E. Kydland won the economics prize in 2004
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