Edvard Moser
Neuroscientist, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience
About
Edvard Moser is a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim and director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, which the research centres he led became in 2007. He took his doctorate in neurophysiology at the University of Oslo in 1995. In 2005, with May-Britt Moser, he discovered grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex — neurons that fire in a repeating triangular lattice as an animal moves, giving the brain a coordinate system and a metric for space. The two shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with John O'Keefe for identifying the brain's positioning system.
Key Contributions
- Co-discovered grid cells in 2005, showing the brain builds a metric for space rather than merely remembering places
- Shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the brain's positioning system
- Directs the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, built around recording from many neurons at once in freely moving animals
- Extended the entorhinal work toward how the same circuitry may encode time and sequence, not only place
- His grid cells are among the clearest cases of a neural code that was found rather than assumed — the lattice is visible in the raw data
- What the finding does not settle is whether a coordinate system is a representation of space or the thing that constitutes it, which is where the philosophers come in
