The Nobel Foundation has awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize jointly to John O'Keefe and husband-wife team May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser for "their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain."

In 1971, O'Keefe found that a type of nerve in the brain's hippocampus was always "on" when a rat was in a specific place — he called the nerve that was activated a "place cell."

More than three decades later, in 2005, husband and wife team May-Britt and Edvard Moser discovered a different nerve cell, called the "grid cell." Together, the "place cells" and "grid cells" explain how our brain makes a map of the surrounding environment and how we are able to navigate these places.

The Nobel Committee has created a useful graphic to describe the achievements of O'Keefe and May-Britt and Edvard Moser.

See below: