The Surprising Relativism of the Brain's GPS - Issue 58: Self

The first pieces of the brain's "inner GPS" started coming to light in 1970. In the laboratories of University College London, John O'Keefe and his student Jonathan Dostrovsky recorded the electrical activity of neurons in the hippocampus of freely moving rats. They found a group of neurons that increased their activity only when a rat found itself in a particular location.1 They called them "place cells." Building on these early findings, O'Keefe and his colleague Lynn Nadel proposed that the hippocampus contains an invariant representation of space that does not depend on mood or desire.