Transportation
The 30-Year Quest to Find the Brain's Transit Center
Science has solved a centuries-old question: How does the mind process space?
Kant got it right. "Space is not something object and real, nor a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation," he wrote in his 1770 Inaugural Dissertation. "[I]nstead, it is subjective and ideal, and originates from the mind's nature in accord with a stable law as a scheme, as it were, for coordinating everything sensed externally."
That's the best explanation I've heard yet for the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which was awarded early this week to three scientists for a key discovery in epistemology. Almost 250 years after Kant described the concept of space as "pure intuition," neuroscientists John O'Keefe and May-Britt and Edvard Moser jointly took the award for discovering the brain's internal positioning center.