Edvard Moser
Artificial intelligence is built to imitate the brain, yet most leaders backing it cannot say how the brain actually works. The only proven model of general intelligence is still biological. Understanding how it remembers and finds its way is becoming useful in judging what machines can and cannot do.
Edvard Moser is the Nobel laureate neuroscientist who discovered the brain’s positioning system, and he shows leaders what the only proven model of intelligence reveals about the machines now built to imitate it.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Edvard Moser
- He gives an audience the rarest credential in the field, a Nobel Prize in medicine, attached to a discovery they can picture in one image: the brain runs an internal positioning system, built from grid cells he and May-Britt Moser identified in 2005.
- When DeepMind trained a neural network to navigate, it spontaneously reproduced the grid cells he discovered. That makes him a credible voice on the question every leadership team now faces: how close are machines to the way real intelligence actually works?
- His lab is still publishing frontier results, including a 2025 paper in Science on how the brain carves a continuous stream of experience into separate memories. A decade after the prize, the work is still moving.
- The brain circuits he mapped, in the entorhinal cortex, are the first to break down in Alzheimer’s disease. For audiences in health, pharma, and longevity, his work sits at the origin of one of medicine’s hardest problems.
Biography highlights
- Shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, with May-Britt Moser and John O’Keefe, for discovering the brain’s positioning system.
- Discovered grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex in 2005, the finding that defined the prize.
- Founding Director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at NTNU, and co-founder of four Norwegian Centres of Excellence.
- Foreign member of the Royal Society, and of the US National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.
- His discovery was independently echoed by AI: a DeepMind network trained to navigate reproduced grid-like representations, published in Nature in 2018.
- His lab continues to publish in Science and Nature, with a 2025 paper on how the brain organises memory.
Biography
In 2018, a neural network built at DeepMind taught itself to find its way through a virtual space. No one had told it how. To solve the problem, it spontaneously produced the same hexagonal firing patterns that Edvard Moser had found in the brains of rats thirteen years earlier. The machine had reinvented the grid cell.
Those grid cells are the reason Moser shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Working with May-Britt Moser, he identified neurons in the entorhinal cortex that fire in a regular grid as an animal moves, giving the brain an internal coordinate system. Together with the place cells found earlier by John O’Keefe, they form what is often called the brain’s GPS.
The discovery opened a wider programme. Moser’s lab at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, which he founded and directs at NTNU, now studies how the brain encodes space, time, and memory together. A 2025 paper in Science showed how it slices a continuous stream of experience into discrete events we can later recall. The same entorhinal circuits are the first to fail in Alzheimer’s disease, which gives the work a direct line to one of medicine’s hardest problems.
Moser’s path was not the obvious one. He grew up on the west coast of Norway, took a first degree in psychology, and built his research from a standing start at a young university in Trondheim. From there he founded four national Centres of Excellence, the Kavli Institute among them, and was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society and the US National Academies of Sciences and Medicine. The brain is still the only system that has produced general intelligence, and he works on the actual cells that do it.
Key speaking topics
- The brain’s positioning system
- Memory and how it forms
- Biological and artificial intelligence
- The neuroscience of space and time
- Grid cells and spatial navigation
- The brain in health and in Alzheimer’s disease
- The path to a Nobel Prize
Ideal for
- AI, data science, and R&D teams curious about the biological intelligence their models are reaching toward
- Healthcare, pharmaceutical, and longevity organisations working on memory, ageing, and Alzheimer’s
- Innovation and technology audiences interested in how the brain’s intelligence compares with the artificial kind
- Flagship conferences and leadership summits seeking a Nobel laureate a non-specialist audience can follow
Audience outcomes
- A clear, jargon-free picture of how the brain represents space, time, and memory
- A grounded sense of how far artificial intelligence still sits from biological intelligence, and where the two genuinely meet
- Why Alzheimer’s disease takes hold in the brain’s navigation circuits, decades before the first symptoms
- A first-hand account of how a Nobel-winning discovery actually unfolded
Talks
How the brain builds an internal map from grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, and why that system is a gateway to its highest functions.
Key takeaways:
- How grid cells form a honeycomb coordinate system for space
- How networks of these cells let the brain track location and plan routes
- Why the navigation system is a window into higher cognition
How the brain’s sense of space and time combine to form episodic memory, one of the defining features of human cognition.
Key takeaways:
- How the brain registers where we are and when things happen
- How recordings from thousands of neurons reveal core principles of brain function
- How space and time become the building blocks of memory
How the brain’s systems for space, time, and memory work, and why they are the first to break down in Alzheimer’s disease.
Key takeaways:
- How space and time converge in the brain’s memory system
- Why Alzheimer’s pathology begins in the entorhinal cortex, often decades before symptoms
- What understanding these circuits could mean for future treatment
An autobiographical account of the road from a remote island childhood on the Norwegian coast to the discovery of grid cells and the 2014 Nobel Prize.
Key takeaways:
- The critical turning points in becoming a scientist
- How a systematic research programme uncovered the brain’s positioning system
- What the work since the Nobel Prize is revealing about cognition