>>> Navigating the streets of New York can be quite
challenging even with your GPS on. But what if your
GPS fails you in the middle of your ride?
How would that make you feel? Lost? Well according to
John O'Keefe you shouldn't be alarmed because you
already have a backup in your brain. This is a story
of a CUNY graduate who became a Nobel Laureate
and the discovery of place cells.
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>>> [Radio Broadcast] ... are the overlords,
who determine the destiny of mankind...
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>>> The year is 1963. John O'Keefe is summoned to the
dean's office at the City College of New York.
In order to get there, he'll have to face his fears and
navigate the streets of Manhattan in his freshly
painted yellow taxicab.
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O'Keefe, a South Bronx native, never planned on becoming
a taxi driver. In fact, after his father's dreams of being
an aircraft mechanic were dashed by a shipyard accident
in World War II, John picked them up for himself;
studying Aeronautical Engineering at NYU and
taking a job at the Grumman Aircraft Corporation.
But the grueling schedule involving over 100 miles
commuting a day in rush hour traffic proved too difficult and
O'Keefe decided to settle for the freedom of a full-time
college student. Luckily, this freedom came at no cost.
The tuition free City College of New York offered a wide
range of courses and allowed this young man to pursue his
interests without compromise. He took classes in Filmmaking,
Advanced English Literature, Physics and a wide range of
psychology and philosophy courses, paying no attention to
faculty or discipline boundaries. It was here that
he also got his first taste of experimental brain research.
At the time, there were no neuroscience courses offered,
but he took courses in physiological psychology and
was allowed to join a team working on pigeon
exploratory behavior.
[Car Engine Turns Off] [Footsteps]
After reaching the dean's office, O'Keefe was surprised
to find out that he had accumulated enough credits
to receive not one but several degrees. O'Keefe opted to
major in Psychology and minor in Philosophy,
and graduated that same year.
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John's interest in neuroscience led him to focus his
postdoctoral research on a very specific part of the brain:
the hippocampus.
Surprisingly similar across mammals, the hippocampus has
traditionally been known as the formation in the brain that
contained answers to questions of learning and memory.
But in the 1940s this tiny part of the brain was also
marked as the possible location of the so-called
cognitive map, a stimuli based concept of spatial
awareness developed by psychologist Edward Tolman,
and John O'Keefe was excited to dig deep into it.
In 1971 O'Keeffe developed a series of experiments designed
to monitor brain activity in rats. What he was looking
for were firing patterns, or bursts of activity on a
single cell level, that he would later be able to correlate
to certain aspects of animal behavior. The first part of
the experiment turned out to be a complete success.
The electrodes connected to rats' brains returned with
the lovely chirping sound of cellular activity.
Unfortunately, correlating this activity to any of the
common patterns in animals' behavior proved to be
extremely difficult. In the period of the next few months,
O'Keefe started realizing that these bursts of activity did not
have anything to do with what the animal was doing or even
why it was doing it, but rather where it was doing it.
The cells were reacting to their location in the environment.
What O'Keefe discovered was a biological basis of navigation:
a “place cell”. In his book published in 1978 O'Keefe
went on to present his findings and offer a
somewhat blunt prediction: place cells are cells that
constitute spatial awareness in humans,
but they're not the only ones. The hippocampus and
associated brain areas contain networks of cells
that create geographical maps and perform
navigational computations. Nevertheless, many found
it hard to accept that the human hippocampus could
have a similar function to that of a rodent.
Luckily, there was a new player in town.
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Duke Nukem. By the early 90s, advancements in
technology allowed alternative ways of experimenting:
this time on humans.
Emptied of monsters, guns, and an equal number of rats,
Duke Nukem became a complex environment with multiple
rooms and pathways; a virtual space volunteers could learn
how to navigate while their brains were being scanned
for the clues of the cognitive map. The study proved that
the human hippocampus and surrounding areas of
the brain become active whenever a person is engaged
in spatial navigation. In addition, there was a good
correlation between the accuracy of navigation and
the amount of blood flow in the hippocampus.
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A decade later, an experimental study conducted with taxi
drivers showed that the hippocampi of expert and
highly practiced human navigators were larger in
volume than the ones found in average humans.
Little did young O'Keefe know as he drove a taxi
during his days at City College that he was playing out an
experiment which would go on to support his own
theories 50 years later. In 2014, John O'Keefe,
a former CUNY student with wide-ranging interests and
a passion for neuroscience, received a Nobel Prize in
medicine for his discovery of cells that constitute a
positioning system in the brain. So the next time your
GPS fails you, try to remember that our brains come with
a fully functional one at no additional cost.
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