


In 1988, two determined psychology students sat in the office of an internationally renowned neuroscientist in Oslo and explained why they had to study with him.

The researcher, Per Oskar Andersen, was hesitant, May-Britt Moser said as she and her husband, Edvard I. Moser – now themselves internationally recognized neuroscientists – recalled the conversation. He was researching physiology, and they were interested in the intersection of behavior and physiology. But, she said, they wouldn't take no for an answer.

“We sat there for hours. He really couldn't get us out of his office,” May-Britt Moser said.

“It was just a way to get to the point where we wanted to be,” Edvard I. Moser said, smiling at the memory of his younger self. “But seen now, when I know the way people normally do it, I'm quite impressed.”

So, apparently, was Andersen. In the end, he yielded to the Mosers' combination of furious curiosity and unwavering determination and took them on as graduate students.

They have impressed more than a few people since. In 2005, they and their colleagues reported the discovery of cells in rats' brains that function as a kind of built-in navigation system that is at the heart of how animals know where they are, where they are going and where they have been. They called them grid cells.

John O'Keefe of University College London, whose discovery in the 1970s of so-called place cells in the brain that register specific places, like the corner deli or Grandma's house, and who was one of the Mosers' mentors, said the discovery of the grid cells was “incredibly significant.”

The workings of the grid cells show that in the brain “you are constantly creating a map of the outside world,” said Cori Bargmann, of Rockefeller University, who is one of the two leaders of a committee set up to plan the National Institutes of Health's contribution to President Barack Obama's recently announced neuroscience initiative.

On the most profound level, O'Keefe, the Mosers and others speculate that the way the brain records and remembers movement in space may be the basis of all memory. This idea resonates with the memory palaces of the Renaissance, imagined buildings that used spatial cues as memory aids. The technique dates to the ancient Greeks. In this regard, neuroscience may be catching up with intuition.


Edvard, 51, and May-Britt Moser, 50, now direct the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and the Centre for the Biology of Memory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. They have a steady stream of findings coming from their lab, and a slew of awards, the latest of which, the Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize, they received April 16 at the University of North Carolina.

The Mosers married in 1985 while still undergraduates. By the time they had finished their doctorates, in 1995, they had two daughters, but they were ready to see the world, to train in laboratories outside Norway. And they did spend time in England, with O'Keefe, and in Scotland, with Richard Morris at the University of Edinburgh.

But the Mosers' travels were cut short when they were ambushed by a job offer too good to refuse, from the university in Trondheim, where they have been ever since.

They began recording the activity of cells in the hippocampus, with electrodes implanted in the brains of rats as they roamed an enclosed area.


The Mosers wanted to find how information was flowing to the place cells, whether it was going from one area of the hippocampus to another. But the place cells still functioned even after they inactivated sections of this brain area. So it seemed that information was flowing in from the nearby brain area, the entorhinal cortex.

They started looking there, and in their early work they were helped by Menno Witter, then in Amsterdam, now at Trondheim, in the delicate task of guiding the electrodes to the right spot.

“We didn't immediately find the grid cells,” Edvard Moser said. At first they noticed cells that would emit a signal every time a rat went to a particular spot, and they thought that perhaps this was something like the place cells in the hippocampus that are tied to locations in the outside world. But they gradually learned that what they were seeing was a cell that tracked the rat's movement in the same way, no matter where the rat was. The cell was not responding to some external mark; it was keeping track of how the rat moved. And when they gave the rats enough room, a regular pattern emerged.

“The first thing was that we thought there was something wrong with the equipment,” Edvard Moser said.

After a 2005 paper in the journal Nature, in which they reported the discovery and named the cells, other labs confirmed the findings and more discoveries followed, in their lab and elsewhere.

It is now clear that the grid cells, in combination with cells that sense head direction and others that sense borders or boundaries – both originally identified in other parts of the brain by other labs – form a kind of dead-reckoning navigation system in the brain that maps movement.

Information flows from this part of the brain to the hippocampus, and then back. Exactly how the grid informs the place cells, and vice versa, is not known.

What scientists have now are two ends of a system with a black box in the middle that is not fully understood. At one end are place cells. At the other are grid cells. As to what exactly happens in between, and how the grid cells form in the first place, Edvard Moser said, “That's still a 10-, a 20-year research problem.”

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