Medical Discovery News – by UTMB’s David Niesel and Norbert Herzog: How do we know where we are at any time — what is up and down? How do we know that we have been in a place before, and how do we know what to expect around the corner? This may sound like a simple task, but it is actually a complex, dynamic problem for our brains. The 2014 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to a trio of scientists who have unraveled the brain’s internal GPS. Like it sounds, this allows us to know where we are in three-dimensional space in our environment. Together their work reveals the basic principles of how our brains create a figurative map of the space we occupy and how we are able use and store this information to navigate from one place to another.