This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky.

The Nobel Assembly at Carolinska Institute has today decided to award the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with one

half to John O'Keefe and the other half jointly to Mybrid Moser and Edward Moser for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.

Gorin Hansen of the Nobel Committee.

O'Keefe is at University College London.

He discovered the so-called Place Cells in the hippocampus in 1971. The married Moses are at the Norwegian University of

Science and Technology in Trondheim. In 2005 they found the other component of

the brain's inner GPS system, the grid cells.

Julene Zirath, chair of the Nobel Committee,

explains, in terms of visiting Sweden and looking for a landmark,

a recovered 17th century Swedish

warship called the Vassa ship. You're going to go visit an exciting city like

Stockholm and you've never been there before and so the first thing you do is you take a map from the hotel

And you're gonna help your family find the Vasa ship

So you have landmarks on the map. It could be the city hall, could be the concert house, it could be the palace, and the Vossa ship.

Those are like your place sells because as you pass those landmarks they recognize your place in space

The other thing you need on that map is longitude and latitude. You need to find a way to navigate to the Vassa ship in a very efficient way.

And the grid cells function like that navigational chart.

They help you judge your distance and help you find your way. The remarkable thing is that we don't need to have the map in our

hands. We have these maps in our brain and so I would describe it that way.

Thanks to our grid and place cells we don't have to walk around with a map to help us find our way

each time we visit a city because we have that map in our house.

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