Neuroscience: Brains of Norway

Nobel prizewinners May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser have spent a career together near the Arctic Circle exploring how our brains know where we are.

Alison Abbott in Nature:

The fact that Edvard and May-Britt Moser have collaborated for 30 years — and been married for 28 — has done nothing to dull their passion for the brain. They talk about it at breakfast. They discuss its finer points at their morning lab meeting. And at a local restaurant on a recent summer evening, they are still deep into a back-and-forth about how their own brains know where they are and will guide them home. “Just to walk there, we have to understand where we are now, where we want to go, when to turn and when to stop,” says May-Britt. “It's incredible that we are not permanently lost.”

If anyone knows how we navigate home, it is the Mosers. They shot to fame in 2005 with their discovery of grid cells deep in the brains of rats. These intriguing cells, which are also present in humans, work much like the Global Positioning System, allowing animals to understand their location. The Mosers have since carved out a niche studying how grid cells interact with other specialized neurons to form what may be a complete navigation system that tells animals where they are going and where they have been. Studies of grid cells could help to explain how memories are formed, and why recalling events so often involves re-envisioning a place, such as a room, street or landscape.

While pursuing their studies, the two scientists have become a phenomenon. Tall and good-looking, they operate like a single brain in two athletic bodies in their generously funded lab in Trondheim, Norway — a remote corner of northern Europe just 350 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. They publish together and receive prizes as a single unit — most recently, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which they won this week with their former supervisor, neuroscientist John O’Keefe at University College London.

More here.