U.S.-British scientist John O'Keefe and Norwegian husband and wife Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser have won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries of brain cells that people use to orient themselves. (AP)

Three scientists, including a husband-and-wife team, have been awarded this years Nobel Prize in Medicine for deciphering the mechanism in the brain that allows us to find our way around.

The three winners of the worlds most coveted medical research prize are John OKeefe, who holds both U.S. and British citizenship and is director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Center in Neural Circuits and Behavior at University College London; May-Britt Moser, a professor of neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology; and Edward I. Moser of the same university.

All worked on different components of the same problem: how we orient ourselves in space and navigate, the Stockholm-based Nobel committee said in announcing the prize Monday. The discovery of what the group called the brains inner GPS has solved a problem that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries.

OKeefe discovered the first component of this system in 1971. He found that when he placed rats in certain parts of a room different cells in the brains hippocampus which is believed to be important in functions related to space and memory -- were always activated. He theorized that these areas that he called place cells formed a map of the room.

The Mosers, who are from Norway, followed up on that research in 2005, finding what scientists dubbed grid cells that make up a coordinate system that allows us to navigate. The couple was researching rats moving in a room when they noticed that another area of the brain, the entorhinal cortex, was activated in a unique spatial pattern that corresponded with the location of the animals head and the borders of the room.

Research into the inner workings of the brain has been among the top priorities for the scientific community in recent years. Last year, the European Union launched a 10-year effort to simulate the human brain on supercomputers. And President Obama launched a $100 million initiative to build tools to accelerate the pace of brain research an effort that many believe will be as groundbreaking as the Human Genome Project, which led to the sequencing of the 3 billion base pairs that comprise human DNA.

Last year, two Americans -- James Rothman of Yale University and Randy Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley -- and German-born Thomas Suedhof of Stanford University won the Nobel in medicine for their work on how the bodys cells communicate. The research has had a major impact in our understanding of how the brain transmits signals.

Cornelia Bargmann, a neurobiologist at The Rockefeller University and a 2013 winner of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences funded by Internet entrepreneurs Mark Zuckerburg, Sergey Brin and others, said this years Nobel-honored work is groundbreaking because it not only tells us about how the brain understands space but more complex cognitive relationships, as well.

Bargmann, co-chair of the advisory committee for the presidents BRAIN (Brain Research Through Innovative Neurotechnologies)initiative, said the scientists showed the brain creates a two-dimensional grid of the world based on a group of neurons that tell you where you are moving and how you have been. Those points are in turn linked to people, places and other sights, smells and experiences.

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Nobel prize in medicine awarded for discovery of brains GPS