How does your brain know where you are, even in the dark? Brian Greene speaks with Edvard Moser, Nobel laureate and director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, about the discovery of grid cells, the brain’s internal coordinate system for space.
Moser explains how these cells fire in a precise hexagonal pattern that mathematically forms a torus, and why this internal map exists before an animal ever learns to use it. They trace the story from the discovery of place cells in the 1970s through evidence that the same system appears in flies, bats, and humans, and explore why Moser believes our sense of space itself may be a construct the brain imposes on the world. The conversation closes on what this internal mapping system reveals about memory, Alzheimer’s disease, and the far edges of artificial intelligence.
This program is part of the Rethinking Reality series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
This program can be watched here, and on our YouTube channel, starting at 7PM on Friday, September 4.
Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, and is recognized for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in his field of superstring theory. His books, The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos, and The Hidden Reality, have collectively spent 65 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.
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Edvard Moser investigates neural network coding in the cortex, with emphasis on space, time and memory. His work, in collaboration with May-Britt Moser, includes the discovery of grid cells, a …
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