Of all the questions that science has yet to resolve, among the greatest is inside ourselves: the brain. Yet great strides have been made in recent years in understanding this most delicate and complex of instruments.
The Nobel committee yesterday honoured, with the prize for physiology or medicine, three scientists, one of them British, who have been at the forefront of discoveries in cognition. They are John O’Keefe, of University College London, and Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. They eminently deserve recognition.
The scientists’ work in the field of neuroscience has deepened understanding of how the brain calculates and remembers where it is. They have discovered how nerve cells within the brain allow us to