Navigating the human hippocampus without a GPS

The award of the Nobel Prize to Professors John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard Moser brings global recognition to one of the most significant success stories in modern neuroscience. Here, we consider how their findings, along with related studies of spatial cognition in rodents, have informed our understanding of the human hippocampus. Rather than identifying a "GPS" in the brain, we emphasize that these researchers helped to establish a fundamental role for cortico-hippocampal networks in the guidance of behavior based on a representation of the current place, time, and situation. We conclude by highlighting the major questions that remain to be addressed in future research.