Thu. Jan. 15, 5pm: Public talk on the brain's own positioning system
Nobel laureate Edvard Moser explains our "sense of space"
The 2014 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Professors Edvard and May-Britt Moser of NTNU in Trondheim, Norway, and to Prof. John O'Keefe of University College London, for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.
Thu. Jan 15, 5pm: "Neural maps of space: How do we know where we are?"(Prof. Edvard Moser)
- Friedrich von Thiersch lecture theatre (HS 2300, Arcisstr. 21, München)
- Map of the building
- Directions
In this talk, one of the discoverers of the brain's built-in system for orientation and pathfinding will describe how it works. Areas of the brain called the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus form a map of external space that is updated in real time. This universally applicable neural map consists of a number of different functionally specialized cell types, which work together in a complex neural network.
Prof. Moser will focus especially on the role of so-called "grid cells," discovered in his laboratory, which interact with "direction cells" and "border cells" to generate and dynamically update an internal map that helps us find our way from one place to the next.
GRIDMAP: European research collaboration with TUM
Further research is building on these fundamental discoveries with the aim of enabling advances in high-performance computing and robotics. Toward this end, the TUM research group in Neuroscientific System Theory, led by Prof. Jörg Conradt, is collaborating with researchers in Edinburgh, Trieste, and Trondheim. They are partners in an EU-funded project, coordinated by Prof. Moser, called "GRIDMAP: From Brains to Technical Implementations."