Researchers have gained a first insight into how the brain structures higher-level information. By extracting and analysing data from a neural network of grid cells, they found that the collective neural activity is shaped like the surface of a doughnut. The study, from NTNU’s Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and collaborators, is published in Nature.
Nobel laureate and Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience founding director and professor Edvard Moser says a new technology “opens doors to experiments we could only dream about 5 years ago.” The technology in question is called Neuropixels 2.0, a new favourite in the neuroscientists’ toolbox.
We create mental maps as we move around. But these maps can be distorted if the surroundings change. That makes it more difficult to remember where something was.
Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience have discovered a network of brain cells that expresses our sense of time within experiences and memories. The area of the brain where time is experienced is located right next to the area that codes for space.
May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser have been awarded Norway’s Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav.
Composer Bertil Palmar Johansen calls the rats Gjertrud and Hjørdis “rock-and-roll rats” because they’re so cool. They also star in a new art video about neurological research. The music to the video is built on the sound of brain cell signals from May-Britt Moser’s rats.
The brain’s GPS would be worthless if it simply contained maps of our surroundings that were not aligned to the real world. But we now know how this is done.
2014 NOBEL PRIZE: When May-Britt Moser accepts the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with her co-laureates Edvard Moser and John O’Keefe, she’ll be wearing a custom-made gala dress created by a designer who until a year ago was a tunnel engineer.
2014 NOBEL PRIZE: Nobel Laureates and neuroscientists May-Britt and Edvard Moser described how they made their prize-winning discovery in their Nobel lectures on Sunday 7 December. They also gave the audience a tantalizing glimpse into new findings, including the existence of speed cells in the brain, and how odours and memory are linked.
2014 NOBEL PRIZE: When May-Britt Moser gave her Nobel lecture on Sunday, she had some help from the audience. At her signal Moser’s colleagues stood up in the audience and made popping sounds. These are the sounds that the scientists hear when rat brain cells communicate with each other.
2014 NOBEL PRIZE: Animal welfare is important for Nobel laureates May-Britt and Edvard Moser. Not just because that is how it should be, but also because the researchers get the best results that way.
2014 NOBEL PRIZE — There’s a proverb – the origins of which are hotly disputed – that says “It takes a village to raise a child.” You could almost say the same thing about groundbreaking discoveries in neuroscience, if NTNU’s Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience/Centre for Neural Computation (KI/CNC) is any example.
2014 NOBEL PRIZE — Nearly all innovations have founder myths, like the apocryphal garage where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are said to have developed the Apple Computer. But two innovative neuroscientists in Trondheim really did start their research in the university equivalent of a garage – a bomb shelter – and then went on to build a world-class laboratory and win the Nobel Prize.
Your brain has at least four different senses of location – and perhaps as many as 10. And each is different, according to new research from NTNU’s Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience.