Finding Places

The following section is included:

• Contents

White, white, white. The eyes of the Russian lieutenant Ferdinand von Wrangel and his men stung and ached in the sharp light reflected off the snow-covered sea ice. It was early April 1821. Just over a week earlier, the expedition had left the mainland and set off north across the frozen sea in 21 sledges drawn by a total of 240 dogs. For the first few days, they could still see the Baronov cliffs of the mainland on the horizon behind them. After that, the world around them became one endless icy plain, relieved only by open channels and pack ice…

One afternoon in fall 1982, a chance meeting took place on an Oslo street. Thirty-two years later, two of the people who met would dominate the news for weeks on end when they received Norway’s first ever Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine…

The first scientists to study the brain noticed the hippocampal structure, located several centimeters beneath the temple, in the temporal lobe (Figure 1). The region is striking in form — reminiscent of a seahorse — and so in 1587 the Italian anatomist Giulio Aranzi named it after the Latin word for seahorse, hippocampus. Before then, the structure had been known as the Cornu ammonis, after the ancient Egyptian God Amun, with his curved horns. Another aspect that bolstered interest in the structure was that it could be found in the brains of all mammals, from the most primitive to the most highly developed. The hippocampus, therefore, had to have considerable and fundamental significance…

By the early 1980s, when Edvard and May-Britt were students, brain research had become so popular that the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) created a TV program about it, Your Fantastic Brain, and broadcasted it at prime time. This was largely thanks to Per Andersen, an internationally renowned neuroscientist and a gifted communicator…

One day in 1988, Edvard and May-Britt Moser knocked on the door to Per Andersen’s office.

“He was a person people respected a great deal, including us. So it took a lot of nerve to work up the courage to go to his office. But we were desperate. Our future totally depended on whether or not he agreed to supervise our master’s thesis,” says May-Britt Moser…

The committee assessing PhD applications in psychology had a tough job in 1990. Only five grants were on offer in the whole of Norway. The tricky thing was that two of the most qualified applicants were from the same research community in Oslo, shared the same supervisor, and, on top of it all, were married to each other. It would be controversial to award almost half that year’s resources to the very same research group, but these two applicants were exceptional. Two of the committee members were especially enthusiastic and worked hard to convince the others: Kenneth Hugdahl, a professor at the University of Bergen, and Svein Magnussen of the University of Oslo. After a long discussion, the committee ultimately decided to award both of the married researchers a grant…

Driving into Edinburgh for the first time, it’s impossible not to be impressed by Edinburgh Castle. It looms majestically over the city, half protective, half threatening, from its platform of volcanic rock. Norwegian visitors to the city quickly notice the absence of wooden houses; everything is built of stone. The city center also bears the stamp of the university that has been there since 1538. Imposing university buildings are scattered throughout the old town. The university has many eminent figures among its alumni, including a young Charles Darwin, who studied medicine at Edinburgh before becoming an evolutionary biologist…

From a bird’s eye view, London looks like a huge, complex maze. A patchwork of boroughs, broad and narrow streets, buildings, and railroad lines, dotted with the occasional patch of green. It’s a wonder the people of this megacity can find their way around…

As students in Oslo, Edvard and May-Britt often daydreamed together about the department they would someday build. But never would they have believed they would have free rein to do whatever they wanted so soon after completing their PhDs…

Marianne Fyhn switched on the electric shaver and bent over the little rat lying before her on the table. The rat’s eyes were open, but the animal was anesthetized. The white sheen in its eyes was the ointment that would prevent them from drying out during surgery…

Some weeks after Fyhn’s article was published, California-based hippocampus researcher Bill Skaggs came across it. Skaggs immediately noticed one of the figures, Figure 2B, which showed where in the environment the cells were active. The figure struck him as extremely unusual. He had seen tens of thousands of figures from hippocampal cells over the course of his career, but he had never seen anything like this…

130 years after Charles Darwin proposed the existence of a specialized brain area that allows humans and animals to orient themselves in space, May-Britt and Edvard Moser had found this area in rats’ brains. And since both rats and humans are mammals, and have the same fundamental brain structure, there was every reason to believe that humans also had such an area. An area deep inside both hemispheres of the brain and far removed from the outer senses was tightly packed with cells capable of measuring the world. But were the grid and place cells alone enough to constitute an animal’s internal positioning system…

To Greek and Roman thinkers living 2,000 years ago, it was clear that there was a connection between place and memory, and they used this connection to develop memory techniques. In De Oratore, a work that dates back to 55 BCE, the Roman orator Cicero advised speechmakers to choose a place they could conjure up in their thoughts and where they could mentally lay out different objects that would later help them remember what they wanted to say. The method went by the name of “Loci” or “memory palace,” and is used to this day by the world’s foremost masters of memory to remember long series of numbers or cards.

When May-Britt Moser climbed the four flights of stairs at the Norwegian Brain Centre on Monday October 6, 2014, hair loose and a woolen cardigan over her floral print dress, she had no idea how memorable this day would be. Many people had taken time off for the autumn break, and it seemed quieter than normal at the Kavli Institute. Edvard Moser was en route to a meeting at Munich’s Max Planck Institute. May-Britt hurried through the door on the fourth floor as usual. On Monday mornings they had lab meetings, where they took turns to present results from the various projects they were running, and she was looking forward to hearing the latest news from the other researchers…

Composer Bertil Palmar Johansen sits in an office at the Kavli Institute listening to a crackling from the loudspeakers. He has heard many neural recordings, and at first he doesn’t notice anything special about the cell that PhD student Øyvind Høydal is playing back to him. The activity follows the same types of patterns he is used to hearing from these neurons…

The following sections are included:

• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index