Edvard Moser, May-Britt Moser, and
John O'Keefe, the three 2014 Nobel Prize winners for Physiology or Medicine, along with
Eleanor Maguire, the winner of the 2003
Ig Nobel Prize for her "London taxi driver" study on hippocampal plasticity, spoke at a public forum at the University of Arizona.
Maquire's research on London taxi drivers, before and after going through two to three years of training required to learn and memorize 25,000 streets, revealed that their hippocampus grew as they memorized London's maze of streets. This was one of the first studies that demonstrated hippocampal neuroplasticity. She was awarded a 2003 Ig Nobel Prize for this study.
According to
Improbable Research, the bestowers of the Ig Nobel Prize, "
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, and then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology."
The Mosers and O'Keefe won their Nobel Prize in 2014 for their discoveries of specialized cells in the brain that together act as a navigation system. The Mosers discovered neurons that function as
grid cells, found in the entorhinal cortex, while O'Keefe discovered neurons that function as
place cells, found in the hippocampus.
"All memories are attached in some way to where you are, and in that way, the hippocampus acts as an anchor for remembering yourself within your experience," said Carol Barnes, Regents' Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Neurology and Neuroscience, the Evelyn F. McKnight Endowed Chair for Learning and Memory in Aging.
The hippocampus,
according to Wikipedia, "
belongs to the limbic system and plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory and spatial navigation." If a person were to suffer severe damage to the hippocampus (both hippocampi, as one exists in each brain hemisphere), it's likely they may acquire
anterograde amnesia, an inability to form and/or retain new memories (
episodic or
autobiographical memory, which are forms of
declarative memory). In Alzheimer's Disease, the hippocampus is one of the first brain regions to experience damage, resulting in the disorientation and loss of recognition so common in the disease. However, damage to the hippocampus does not inhibit the ability to learn new skills, such as riding a bicycle (
procedural memory).
2014 Nobel Prize Winners Speak at the University of ArizonaThursday afternoon, Edvard Moser, May-Britt Moser, and John O'Keefe, the three 2014 Nobel Prize winn[...]
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