HWN Suggests

The Chatty Hippocampus

The hippocampus, a skinny log of brain tissue tucked in deep above your ear, is the star of memory research. People with damaged hippocampi — such as the famous patient Henry Molaison, known as H.M. — can’t make new memories. And studies in rodents have shown that creating new memories drives robust connections between neurons in the hippocampus.

Despite getting all the attention, the hippocampus doesn’t act alone. Our memories are as good as they are only because of the way the hippocampus talks to the rest of the brain. A study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences underscores the importance of hippocampal interactions with the prefrontal cortex,…

read full article

Featured

 Hippocampus Is the Brain’s Storyteller

People love stories. We find it easier to remember events when they are part of an overarching narrative. But in real life, the chapters of a story don’t follow smoothly one from another. Other things happen in between. A new brain imaging study from the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, shows that the hippocampus is the brain’s storyteller, connecting separate, distant events into a single narrative.

 Is GPS really ruining our brains?

The hippocampus is a seahorse-shaped structure that resides deep in your brain and functions like an internal GPS. It helps us figure out where we are, if we’ve been there before, and where we should go next. Before the age of GPS, before drawn maps, the hippocampus had evolved (among its many purposes) to help us navigate the world. Now, it’s easy to wonder, are we undermining it?

 Modeling the hippocampus, part I: Why the hippcampus?

Besides being heavily involved in memory the hippocampus also plays a crucial role in the processing of emotions, spatial navigation, and integration of different sensory information.

 The hippocampus: Why we need it and how we strengthen it

Evolutionarily speaking, this part of our brain is very old – information from various other brain regions flows together here, is processed, and is then sent back to our cerebral cortex. For exactly this reason, the hippocampus plays an enormous role in transmitting short-term memory images to long-term memory – in short, in forming memories. But that’s not all it does...

Articles of Interest

Explainer: what happens in the hippocampus?

The hippocampus is located in the middle of the brain in a region known as the medial temporal lobe. Imagine travelling inward from your ear toward the centre of your head. It resembles a seahorse, with the name derived from the Greek words “hippo” for horse and “kampos” for sea.

Hippocampus

Emotion and memory are inextricably linked, and emotionally-charged memories tend to be stronger. The hippocampus is partially responsible for this fact. It links both emotions and sensory input to memories and then sends memory-storing signals to the cerebral hemisphere.

Hippocampus in health and disease: An overview

It is the earliest and most severely affected structure in several neuropsychiatric disorders such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), epilepsy etc.

How your brain conjures dreams

Dreams tap memories stored in connections between brain cells, which the hippocampus tracks as they form. At night it directs neurons to replay recollections, facilitating long-term storage. That could be why reality seeps into our visions—but not why they tend to warp reality.

Hungry, Hungry Hippocampus: Why and How We Eat

Anyone who's tried (and failed) to follow a diet knows that food is more than fuel. The reasons we eat are even embedded in our language. When we're in an unfamiliar place, we yearn for comfort food. We take one too many scoops of ice cream because we stress eat. We connect to others by breaking bread.

Know Everything About The Hippocampus Brain

In simple words, the hippocampus brain is responsible for acquiring new information, forming coherent structures with the data, organizing it with other relevant information, and storing it all with segregated significance. In short, the hippocampus brain is the one responsible for creating and remembering new memories.

Know your brain: Hippocampus

The hippocampus is found in the temporal lobe below the cerebral cortex. Although we often refer to it in the singular, there are actually two hippocampi—one in each cerebral hemisphere. The term hippocampus comes from the Greek word for seahorse, because when it is removed from the brain, the hippocampus vaguely resembles a seahorse

Memory and the hippocampus

When Henry Molaison (now widely known as HM) cracked his skull in an accident, he began blacking out and having seizures. In an attempt to cure him, daredevil surgeon Dr William Skoville removed the hippocampus in HM's brain. Luckily, the seizures did go away—but so did his long-term memory! Sam Kean walks us through this astonishing medical case, detailing everything HM taught us about the brain and memory.

Scientists Discover 'Time Cells' In the Brain That Enable 'Mental Time Travel'

A new experiment probed how the human brain encodes and processes the flow of time.

Searching for the Brain's Internal Clock

Over the last few years, a handful of researchers have compiled growing evidence that the same cells that monitor an individual’s location in space also mark the passage of time. This suggests that two brain regions—the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex, both famous for their role in memory and navigation—can also act as a sort of timer.

StatPearls

The hippocampus is the "flash drive" of the human brain and is often associated with memory consolidation and decision making, but it is far more complex in structure and function than a flash drive. The hippocampus is a convex elevation of gray matter tissue within the parahippocampal gyrus inside the inferior temporal horn of the lateral ventricle. One can describe it more holistically as a curved and recurved sheet of the cortex that folds into the temporal lobe's medial surface. T

Stressing the Hippocampus: Why It Matters

The hippocampus is a brain area involved in memory that animal studies have shown to be sensitive to the effects of stress. Meanwhile, studies in adults with post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) related to either early childhood abuse or adult traumas like combat have found smaller hippocampal volume.

The Brain That Couldn’t Remember

The untold story of the fight over the legacy of “H.M.” — the patient who revolutionized the science of memory.

The Brain’s “Bravery Cells” Encourage Risky Behavior

Cells in the hippocampus help determine whether to be apprehensive in stressful situations, and they could be stimulated to treat anxiety.

The hippocampus underlies the association between self-esteem and physical health

Abundant evidence suggests that the hippocampus is the core area of self-esteem For example, Pruessner et al. found that self-esteem was related to hippocampal volume in both young and old adults.

The Hippocampus, Self-Esteem, and Physical Health

he hippocampus is a key area of the brain involved with basic function, part of the temporal lobe and intimately related with the amygdala. The hippocampus is involved with memory storage and retrieval, while the amygdala is best known for its role in fear and alarm in the face of potential threats. When functioning properly, the hippocampus is thought to create an appropriate context for memories, helping to support a coherent narrative of what is and is not really dangerous, keeping the amygdala regulated so that it is active only when appropriate...and buffering against excess stress, both from the environment and internally-generated.

The Hippocampus: A Less Tangled Web

In contrast to the cortex, the hippocampus is a comparatively well understood part of the brain on the implementational, algorithmic, and computational level. Of course, important details continue to be discovered, but it is probably fair to say that are less confused about what is happening in the hippocampus than in the cortex.

Time Finds Its Place in the Hippocampus

The hippocampus is required for creating new episodic memories, memories of specific experiences along with when and where those experiences occurred. Recalling when events occurred in our past is such an effortless task for us that we can take it for granted, but until a relatively recent study by Clayton and Dickinson (1998), it was unclear whether animals had a similar ability.

What is the hippocampus?

The hippocampus is a heavily investigated part of the brain, but it wasn't until the 1950s that scientists were truly able to grasp what role it plays. In 1953, Henry Molaison consented to an experimental procedure allowing doctors to surgically remove his hippocampus and neighboring regions to address his epilepsy. The surgery stopped his seizures, but caused Molaison to develop a form of amnesia. He was able to form fresh memories but they lasted minutes, and he could no longer permanently store new information, according to neuroscientist Larry R. Squire's 2009 review of Molaison's case, published in the journal Neuron.

Your Brain's Memory Storage Command Center

Ever wondered why a particular scent triggers something that happened a while back? Well, that’s the hippocampus in play AKA memory storage command center. Mankind has known about it for centuries making it one of the most studied parts of the brain. The name originated from the Greek words hippo (horse) and Kampo (monster) because it’s shaped like a seahorse. “Horse Monster” - hopefully that helps you to remember it!