Anglo-American John O'Keefe and Norwegian couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser won the 2014 Nobel Prize for medicine on Monday for discovering the brain's internal positioning system, helping humans find their way and giving clues to how strokes and Alzheimer's affect the brain, Reuters reports.

The Nobel Assembly, which awarded the prize of 8 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million) in an announcement at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, said the discovery solved a problem that has occupied 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?"

Medicine is the first of the Nobel Prizes awarded each year.

Prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel.