Nobel winner for medicine says brain's 'inner GPS' evident in London cabbies

London

JOHN O'Keefe, the US-British neuroscientist who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine on Monday, told AFP that the brain's "inner GPS" or global positioning system he discovered was starkly evident in London taxi drivers. The 74-year-old, who jointly won the prize with his former students, Norwegian couple Edvard and May-Britt Moser, has been bending the ear of US President Barack Obama about the importance of such research in helping find cures for brain diseases. He found in 1971 that specific cells in the hippocampus part of the brain were triggered in rats when in a certain location. Thirty-four years later, in 2005, the Mosers found "grid cells" linking the information together.

"In the same way that GPS allows you to locate yourself in an area or even on the surface of the Earth and then find your way to a desired location, it does exactly the same thing for the brain," Prof O'Keefe said. "It tells you where you are, where you want to go." He said there were also cells registering direction and landmarks.