ABSTRACT
John O'Keefe is a Nobel winning neuroscientist, who is famous for his discovery of place cells in the hippocampus – neurons that encode an animal's location in its geographic space and which are involved in navigation and creating a cognitive map of the environment. O'Keefe and Nadel suggested that similar hippocampal neural mechanisms might underlie other types of cognition including episodic memory and even the deep structure of language. O'Keefe is optimistic that an understanding of the hippocampus will allow us to find out more about Alzheimer's disease, and to this end, is intent on developing mouse models of place cell function to show how hippocampus physiology can become dysfunctional during disease progression. Convincing evidence that hippocampal place cells utilise landmark-based information that is dependent on the array of spatial cues came from a study O'Keefe performed with research student Dulcie Conway.
