An Anglo American, John O'Keefe, and the Norwegian husband and wife team of May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Medicine for discovering the brain's equivalent of the global positioning system that helps us find our way around in our daily lives.

Besides discovering our "internal positioning system," the duo and their discovery also gave clues as to how strokes and Alzheimer's affect the brain.

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Each Nobel Laureate was awarded US$1.1 million by the Nobel Assembly, which made the announcement at Sweden's Karolinska Institute Oct 6. Medicine is the first of the Nobel Prizes awarded every year.

"This is so great, this is crazy. I am just jumping, screaming," Mrs. Moser told Reuters. "I am so proud of all the support that we have had. People have believed in us, in what we have been doing and now this is the reward."

O'Keefe is a director at the center in neural circuits and behavior at University College London. The Mosers now work at scientific institutes in the Norwegian city of Trondheim. The trio worked together starting 1996 to learn how to record the activity of cells in the hippocampus, the part of the brain involved in forming memories, organizing and storing information.

The Nobel Assembly said the Nobel Laureates' discovery solved a problem that has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries: "How does the brain create a map of the space surrounding us and how can we navigate our way through a complex environment?"

The three scientists had discovered "an inner GPS that makes it possible to know where we are and find our way," said Ole Kiehn, a Nobel committee member and professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institute.

O´Keefe discovered the first component of the human positioning system in 1971 when he discovered a type of nerve cell in the hippocampus was always activated when a rat was in a certain spot in a room.

Observing that other nerve cells were activated when the rat was in other locations, O´Keefe concluded these "place cells" created a map of the room.

Almost 10 years later, the Mosers discovered cells in the entorhinal cortex region in brains of rats that function as a navigation system. The "grid cells" they discovered constantly create a map of the outside world. They're also responsible for animals' knowing where they are, where they've been, and where they're going.

The trio's findings, which are a fundamental piece of research, explain how the brain works.

Knowledge of the brain's positioning system also helps scientists understandi what causes loss of spatial awareness in stroke patients or those with dementias like Alzheimer's.

"The discovery...revolutionized our understanding of how the brain knows where we are and is able to navigate within our surroundings," said Andrew King, a professor of neurophysiology at the University of Oxford in the UK.