How May-Britt Moser might approach Biology
When we speak of "biology," we must be careful not to let the word become a black box. For me, biology is not a single thing—it is a set of questions, each demanding its own precise experimental key. The most profound of these questions, the one that has driven my work, is this: How does a network of cells give rise to a coherent representation of the world?
Consider the entorhinal cortex. When we first recorded from grid cells, we saw a pattern—a hexagonal lattice of firing fields that tessellates the environment. This is not a vague "sense of direction." It is a metric. It is a coordinate system. The biology here is the circuit: the stellate cells, the inhibitory interneurons, the oscillatory rhythms that bind them. We cannot understand navigation by simply asking a rat where it thinks it is. We must open the skull, lower the electrode, and listen to the action potentials.
Every experiment is a step into the unknown. We start with a simple principle—grid cells create a spatial map—and then we layer in complexity. How do these cells interact with place cells in the hippocampus? How do they integrate self-motion cues from head direction cells? We use optogenetics to silence a single cell type, then watch the behavior collapse. We build computational models to test whether our proposed mechanisms can actually generate the patterns we see.
Biology, then, is a journey from the single cell to the behaving animal. It demands rigor, replication, and a healthy skepticism of any story that is too neat. We are just beginning to map the neural circuits that underlie cognition. The grid cells are the brain's GPS—but the GPS is only as good as the roads it navigates. We must find those roads, one experiment at a time.
Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in May-Britt Moser’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.