What animal rights extremists call “curiosity-based science” with no relevance to humans and “torture”, the Nobel committee calls paradigm shifting basic science that has changed our very understanding of the brain itself. Once again, the Nobel Comittee has recognized responsible and humane basic and translational animal research that is fundamentally necessary for the evolution of our comprehension of how the brain supports our mental functions and how its dysfunction contributes to mental illness and neurologial diseases.
Speaking of Research congratulates John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser on being awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine“for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain”.
By recording the activity of individual nerve cells within the brains of rats that were moving freely through their environment, they have shown how specialised nerve cells work together to execute higher cognitive processes.
In 1971 John O’Keefe identified the first component of the system, by identifying cells in the hippocampus that were only activated when a rat was in a certain position in its environment. These cells were activated when the rat visited the same location, but different nerve cells were activated when the rat visited a new location, these “place cells” were not merely registering visual input, but were building up an inner map of the environment. John O’Keefe is now…
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