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Who discovered place cells in the hippocampus?

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Patient H.M. and short-term memory loss explained — hippocampus Learn about Henry Molaison (better known as “patient H.M.”), whose short-term memory loss following a lobotomy helped researchers to understand how brain structures are related to brain function.

Place cells in the hippocampus were discovered in 1971 by British-American neuroscientist John O’Keefe and his student Jonathan O. Dostrovsky.12

Through their research on the neural activity of rats, they observed that certain neurons increased their firing rates when an animal was in a specific location within its environment. O’Keefe and Dostrovsky proposed that these cells were fundamental to the brain's ability to form a cognitive map, a concept that significantly advanced the scientific understanding of spatial memory and navigation. For this groundbreaking discovery, O’Keefe later shared the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Norwegian neuroscientists May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser, who subsequently identified other critical components of the brain's spatial navigation system, such as grid cells.321