May-Britt and Edvard Moser could present new pieces to the puzzle about our sense of place in their Nobel lectures Sunday.
Among them own “speed cell” that may indicate a built speedometer in the brain.
Along with the third Nobel Prize winner in medicine, their mentor John O’Keefe from University College London, they were received with a standing ovation from a packed Aula Medica at Karolinska Institutet, where they kept their Nobel lecture – spiced with humor, videos and music.
Read also: Moser explained brain research with humor
Space Cells
O’Keefe told about the work that led to the discovery of what he called space cells in the part of the brain called the hippocampus. Space cells gives us a kind of map of the surroundings.
There are indications that the structures in the brain that gives us a sense of place at least partly innate. Parts of it is there until we have opened his eyes and got our first sense impressions, noted O’Keefe.
May-Britt and Edvard Moser went apprenticed O’Keefe, and used his method to explore in another part of the brain (entorhinal cortex).
It led to the discovery of grid cells, cells that are active in a hexagonal pattern and constitutes a kind of coordinate system in the brain.
Read also: Personal assistant and limousine for the Norwegian Nobel winners
Fart Cells
But the hunt for new pieces of the puzzle about our sense of place continues. Previously identified own direction cells and edge cells.
May-Britt Moser launched a new cell type: Speed cells.
– We have also asked us about how grid cells know when to be active. Do they have a built speedometer? Yeah, maybe they have it, she said.
She showed new experiments where they have easy in another part of the entorhinal cortex than where the grid cells were localized.
They found a separate type of cells in which the activity ranged clear with how fast a rat race on a treadmill where researchers could determine the pace. These speed cells send information to the grid cells, so that they know when to “fire”, when they are activated, explained May-Britt Moser.
Read also: – Without NTNU no Nobel
Sense and memory
She gave other tidbits from the work of their research at NTNU: Rats can remember objects in a room, also long after they have been removed, rats who made himself map of 11 different rooms and correlation between odors, place and memory.
– There is a reason that so-called memory palaces is a useful memory technique , she said.
Edvard Moser thanked for the Nobel Prize also on behalf of the entire relatively young research field of neuroscience. He showed how the young psychology students were disappointed that the physiological aspects of how the brain worked was almost absent in the theories. For it was this borderland between psychology and neurophysiology they wanted to work and was inspired by.
The Nobel Prize is an honor for the whole of this field of research, stated Edvard Moser.
Nobel lectures ended with a swinging music, where professors at NTNU Department of Music improvise fresh over a folk – in words and music.
This case was originally published on Gemini.no – a site for research news from NTNU and SINTEF.
Read also:
The biggest stack should go to Fred Kavli
The term artificial intelligence occurred in 1956. Where are we now?
Preparing “brain 2.0″
‘); }}); was cX = cX || {}; cX.callQueue = cX.callQueue || []; functionaries myOnImpressionResult (event) {console.log (“Matched ads:” + event.matchedAdCount); if (event.matchedAdCount
No comments:
Post a Comment