May-Britt and Edvard Moser Explore the Brain's GPS May-Britt Moser with Thelma, one of the lab rats used in the research she and her husband, Edvard I. Moser, are conducting. TRONDHEIM, Norway - In 1988, two determined psychology students sat in the office of an internationally renowned neuroscientist in Oslo and explained to him why they had to study with him. Unfortunately, the researcher, Per Oskar Andersen, was hesitant, May-Britt Moser said as she and her husband, Edvard I. Moser, now themselves internationally recognized neuroscientists, recalled the conversation recently. He was researching physiology and they were interested in the intersection of behavior and physiology. But, she said, they wouldn't take no for an answer. We sat there for hours. He really couldn't get us out of his office," Dr. May-Britt Moser said. "Both of us come from nonacademic families and nonacademic places," Edvard said. The places where we grew up, there was no one with any university education, no one to ask. There was no recipe on how to do these things. "And how to act politely," May-Britt interjected. It was just a way to get to the point where we wanted to be. But seen now, when I know the way people normally do it," he said, smiling at the memory of his younger self, "I'm quite impressed." So, apparently, was Dr. Andersen. In the end, he yielded to the Mosers" combination of furious curiosity and unwavering determination and took them on as graduate students. They have impressed more than a few people since. In 2005, they and their colleagues reported the discovery of cells in rats" brains that function as a kind of built-in navigation system that is at the very heart of how animals know where they are, where they are going and where they have been. They called them grid cells. "I admire their work tremendously," said Eric Kandel, the Nobel laureate neuroscientist who heads the Kavli Institute for Brain Science at Columbia and who has followed the Mosers" careers since they were graduate students. John O'Keefe of University College London, whose discovery in the 1970s of so-called place cells in the brain that register specific places, like the corner deli or grandma's house, and who was one of the Mosers" mentors, said that the discovery of the grid cells was "incredibly significant." The workings of the grid cells show that in the brain "you are constantly creating a map of the outside world," said Cori Bargmann, of Rockefeller University, who is one of the two leaders of a committee set up to plan the National Institutes of Health's contribution to President Obama's recently announced neuroscience initiative. Often, the workings of billions of neurons that produce our thoughts are opaque. But electrical recordings of signals emitted by grid cells show a map "with a framework and coordinates that are completely intuitive," Dr. Bargmann said. And to find such a straightforward system is, in its own way, "just mind-boggling." What is the brain doing being so mysteriously unmysterious? The implications of the discovery are both practical and profound. The cells have been proved to exist in primates, and scientists think they will be found in all mammals, including humans. The area in the brain that contains the grid cell navigation system is often damaged early in Alzheimer's disease, and one of the frequent early symptoms of Alzheimer's patients is that they get lost. The Mosers do not work on humans, but any clues to understanding how memory and cognitive ability are lost are important. On the most profound level, Dr. O'Keefe, the Mosers and others speculate that the way the brain records and remembers movement in space may be the basis of all memory. This idea resonates with the memory palaces of the Renaissance, imagined buildings that used spatial cues as memory aids. The technique dates to the ancient Greeks. In this regard, neuroscience may be catching up with intuition. A Welcome Ambush Edvard, 51, and May-Britt Moser, 50, now direct the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and the Centre for the Biology of Memory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology here in Trondheim. They have a steady stream of findings coming from their lab, and a slew of awards, the latest of which, the Perl-U.N.C. Neuroscience Prize, they received April 16 at the University of North Carolina. But they did not grow up in a center of academic ferment or intellectual competition. They were born and raised on islands off the coast of Norway a couple of hundred miles north of Bergen, part of an area known as Norway's Bible Belt. They went to the same high school, but didn't really get to know each other until they met again at the University of Oslo in the 1980s. May-Britt, who grew up on a farm, remembers an environment in which drinking, card playing and dancing were all frowned upon. When she called home from Oslo announcing that she had been to a bar and had her first beer, her mother said, "And what's next?" The Mosers married in 1985 while still undergraduates. By the time they had finished their doctorates, in 1995, they had two daughters, but they were ready to see the world, to train in laboratories outside Norway. And they did spend time in England, with Dr. O'Keefe, and in Scotland, with Richard Morris at the University of Edinburgh. But the Mosers" travels were cut short when they were ambushed by a job offer too good to refuse, from the university in Trondheim, where they have been ever since.