The hippocampus is a region of the brain known to the associated with memory, learning, spatial navigation and emotion. In 1971, neuroscientists discovered that the hippocampus influences spatial navigation through the formation ...
A longstanding division exists between hippocampus-dependent and non-hippocampus dependent memory since only the latter can be acquired and retrieved in the absence of normal hippocampal functions. In agreement with the familiar ...
(Medical Xpress)—In dynamic neuronal networks, pervasive oscillatory activity is usually explained by pointing to pacemaking elements that synchronize and drive the network. Recently, however, scientists at The Weizmann ...
You may not realize it, but each time you recall a memory—like your first time riding a bike or walking into your high school prom—your brain changes the memory ever so slightly. It's almost like adding an Instagram filter, ...
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A study of spatial learning in mice shows that exposure to new experiences dampens established representations in the brain's hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, allowing the mice to learn new navigation strategies. The study, ...
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When we visit a friend or go to the beach, our brain stores a short-term memory of the experience in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. Those memories are later "consolidated"—that is, transferred to another part ...
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A new study shows that when you finish your spouse's sentences or answer a fill-in-the-blank question, you're engaging the brain's relay station for memories, an area that until now was largely neglected by scientists studying ...
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How is the brain able to use past experiences to guide decision-making? A few years ago, researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health discovered in rats that awake mental replay of past experiences is critical ...
Mar 11, 2016
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(Medical Xpress)—Meet the hippocampus: A seahorse-shaped structure in the cerebral cortex's medial temporal lobe, it's part of the limbic system, generally believed to be involved in spatial navigation and establishing ...
For the first time, scientists have seen evidence of where the brain records the time and place of real-life memories.
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The hippocampus is a major component of the brains of humans and other mammals. It belongs to the limbic system and plays important roles in long-term memory and spatial navigation. Like the cerebral cortex, with which it is closely associated, it is a paired structure, with mirror-image halves in the left and right sides of the brain. In humans and other primates, the hippocampus is located inside the medial temporal lobe, beneath the cortical surface. Its curved shape reminded early anatomists of the horns of a ram (Cornu Ammonis), or a seahorse. The name, in fact, was taken by the sixteenth century anatomist Julius Caesar Aranzi from the Greek word for seahorse (Greek: ιππος, hippos = horse, καμπος, kampos = sea monster).
In Alzheimer's disease the hippocampus is one of the first regions of the brain to suffer damage; memory problems and disorientation appear among the first symptoms. Damage to the hippocampus can also result from oxygen starvation (hypoxia), encephalitis, or medial temporal lobe epilepsy. People with extensive hippocampal damage may experience amnesia—the inability to form or retain new memories.
In rodents, the hippocampus has been studied extensively as part of the brain system responsible for spatial memory and navigation. Many neurons in the rat and mouse hippocampus respond as place cells: that is, they fire bursts of action potentials when the animal passes through a specific part of its environment. Hippocampal place cells interact extensively with head direction cells, whose activity acts as an inertial compass, and with grid cells in the neighboring entorhinal cortex.
Because of its densely packed layers of neurons, the hippocampus has frequently been used as a model system for studying neurophysiology. The form of neural plasticity known as long-term potentiation (LTP) was first discovered to occur in the hippocampus and has often been studied in this structure. LTP is widely believed to be one of the main neural mechanisms by which memory is stored in the brain.
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