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Much of this learning has come about by carefully taking the hippocampus apart and analyzing the activities of its components and connections.īut Soltesz, who has devoted more than 30 years to understanding how brain circuits work (or don’t), has gone a step further, taking to heart a thought attributed to the late, famed Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman: If you can build it, you can understand it. These features, along with some anatomical and physiological ones that make it easy and exciting to study, have propelled the once-mysterious hippocampus to the fore as arguably the most thoroughly researched part of the brain. He couldn’t get around on his own.įrom his experience and many thousands of unrelated experiments, brain scientists and brain surgeons have learned that the hippocampus is both indispensable for learning and memory and, often, the seat where epileptic seizures are initiated. could learn new motor skills just fine but couldn’t remember learning them. “For H.M., it was always as if for the first time.” “You could have a perfectly lucid conversation with him, walk out of the room to get coffee, come back in and have the same exact conversation all over again,” said Ivan Soltesz, PhD, professor and vice chair of neurosurgery at the Stanford School of Medicine. His pre-existing biographical memories were unaffected. But for the rest of his long life (he died in 2008 at 82), he could not remember anything new - not a single thing - for more than 30 seconds. is widely known among neuroscientists as both a cautionary tale and a wake-up call.
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The plight of the patient, Henry Molaison - referred to as H.M. In the 1950s, not much was known about the role of the hippocampus - or any other brain structure. If you spend enough time staring at a cross section of it on a slide, you may eventually come to see it as resembling a seahorse, which is what the Latin terms hippo and kampos roughly translate to. The hippocampus is a little horn-shaped structure found on each side of the brain’s midline just above the ears.