Significant Role of Hippocampus
Hippocampus is a small, curved region, which exists in both hemispheres of the brain and plays a vital role in emotions, learning and acquisition of new information. It also contributes majorly to long term memory, which is permanent information stored in the brain. Although long term memory is the last information that can be forgotten, its impairment has become very common nowadays. The dysfunction is exemplified by many neurological disorders such as amnesia. There are two types of amnesia, anterograde and retrograde. Anterograde amnesia is inability in forming new information, while retrograde refers to the loss of the past memory. As suggested by Cipolotti and Bird (2006), hippocampus’s lesions are responsible for both types of amnesia. According to multiple trace theory, the author suggests that hippocampal region plays a major role in effective retrieving of episodic memory (Cipolotti and Bird, 2006). For example, patients with hippocampal damage show extensively ungraded retrograde amnesia (Cipolotti and Bird, 2006). They have a difficult time in retrieving information from their non-personal episodic events and autobiographical memory. However, this theory conflicts with standard model of consolidation. The difference between these theories suggests that researchers need to do more work to solve this controversy. Besides retrieving information, hippocampus is also important in obtaining new semantic information, as well as familiarity and recollection (Cipolotti and Bird, 2006). For instance, hippocampal amnesic patient V.C shows in ability to acquire new semantic knowledge such as vocabularies and factual concepts (Cipolotti and Bird, 2006). He is also unable to recognize and recall even...
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...arches, exposing rats to context box repeatedly helps to minimize interference caused by contextual information (Kim, 2014). Kim also suggests that after treatment of bicuculline, increasing of spatial memory and contextual learning interfere with encoding information, therefore, alter the recollection process.
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The hippocampus has been associated with memory formation and consolidation, through lesions studies of bilateral medial temporal lobectomy patients, such as the famously amnesic H.M. In 1971 with the discovery of place cells by O’Keefe and Dostrovsky, spatial navigation was recognised as one of the primary roles of the hippocampus, with their 1978 book ‘The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map' O’Keefe and Nadel’s hypothesis has since commanded great influence in the field.
Various clinical and psychological studies have shown that the hippocampus in the medial temporal lobe is responsible for important learning and memory. In the majority of studies, many researchers propose that the hippocampus is responsible for long-term memory (LTM). LTM impairments occur when damage to bilateral hippocampi are present and can result in anterograde amnesia (difficulty in forming recent memories), retrograde amnesia (difficulty in retrieving memories from the past), or both. However, in this paper, the relationship between the hippocampus and fear memory will be explored explicitly. Understanding the reasoning behind amnesia and the hippocampus is of critical importance in neuroscience.
The hippocampus and amygdala are two of the most researched areas of the brain. The hippocampus and amygdala are two sections of the limbic system (Pinel, 2014). The hippocampus plays role in for memory “spatial location” (Pinel, 2014, p.70). While the amygala plays a “role in memory for the emotional significance of experiences “(Pinel, 2014, p.278). The relationship between the hippocampus and amygdala is that they both work together to form long term memories, process emotions and determine how the emotions are linked into memories (Pinel, 2014). Although, there is little research to prove that the amygdala stores any memories (Pinel, 2014). If the hippocampus and amygdala are damaged, it can result in many different memory deficits,
The second stage of memory processing is storage. Aronson et al. (2013) defines storage as the process by which people store the information they just acquired. Unfortunately, memories are affected by incoming information through alteration or reconstruction. This phenomenon is referred to as recon...
Amnesia, a severe long-term memory loss disease, is caused by damaged brain tissue. There are two different types of amnesia. Retrograde amnesia is also known as backward moving. This is when you have a hard time remembering the past, especially episodic memories. This occurs because of memory consolidation. Memory consolidation is the process of a new memory setting until it becomes permanently in the brain. If this process is disrupted, the memory may be lost (Hockenberry and Hockenberry page 265). Anterograde amnesia is also known as forward moving. This is when you are unable to form new
One night your best friends invite you over for pizza and to play some card games. While enjoying the pizza and games certain parts of your brain are still functioning to make sure things run smoothly. The four areas we will focus on are Broca’s area, the hippocampus, the hypothalamus, and the occipital lobe.
Nairne, J. S., & Pandeirada, J. S. (2008). Adaptive memory: Remembering with a stone-age brain. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17, 239–243.
The hippocampus is the seahorse shaped part of the limbic system involved in forming and retrieving memories. The hippocampus helps individuals determine where they are, how they got to that particular place, and how to navigate to the next destination. Like the rest of the brain, it's made of neurons. These neurons communicate with each other by sending little pulses or spikes of electricity via connections to each other. The hippocampus is formed of two sheets of cells, which are very densely interconnected. Neurons in the hippocampus fire a little spike of electricity when are bodies have gone into one particular place in its environment. It then signals to the rest of the brain by sending a little electrical spike. Together they form a map for the rest of the brain, telling the brain continually where you are within your environment. Sensing the distances and directions of boundaries around you is important for the hippocampus. If we look for this grid like firing pattern throughout the whole brain, we see it in a whole series of locations which are always active when we do all kinds of autobiographical memory tasks. The neural mechanisms for representing the space around us are also used for generating visual imagery so that we can recreate the spatial scene of the events that have happened to us. Your memory starts by place cells activating each other via these dense interconnections and then reactivating boundary cells to create the spatial structure of the scene around your viewpoint. The grid cells then move this viewpoint through that space. The head direction cells fire like a compass according to which way you're facing, defining the viewing direction from which you want to generate an image for your visual imagery. You can then imagine what happened when you were trying to remember where you parked your
The hippocampus gets its name because its structure is similar to that of a seahorse. It is part of the limbic system, which is the area of the brain associated with emotions and memory. The hippocampus is involved in the storage of long-term memory, especially in declarative memory which is remembrance of things like facts of events. Because of its location as part of the limbic system, the hippocampus also attaches emotions to the memories. It also plays a key role in spatial navigation. There is a dialogue between the hippocampus and the neocortex, and is thought to be the cause of the formation, consolidation, and retrieval of
As a results of the patient’s, lesions resulted in his amnesia, in his case having no recollection of past personal memories. K.C. however, knows many things such as, how to read and write, how to play chess and that his family owns a cottage but does not remember learning these facts. This argument corresponds with the thesis that knowing and remembering are two different aspects of the memory. One would also accept the thesis after looking at the brain study presented in the second argument. The brain study shows the flow of blood to different regions of the brain when it is presented questions to do with semantic and episodic memory. From the photos presented in this study, there is indications from the blood flow that information from the episodic memory is mostly processed in the frontal lobes. From the images, there is indications that semantic information is processed in the mid region of the brain. The study of the brain, allows for those in support of the to see the different regions of the brain highlighted when semantic and episodic memory is being invocate.
Hippocampus plays an important job in the formation of new memories about experienced events such as the episodic or the autobiographical memory. It is also a part of larger medial temporal lobe memory system responsible for general declarative memory. General declarative memory is a type of memories that can be explicitly verbalized. If damage to hippocampus occurs only in one hemisphere, our brain can still retain near-normal memory functioning. But even so the hippocampus is damage; some types of memory such as abilities to learn new skills will not be affected. The reason is because, some abilities depends on different types of memory and different regions of the brain such as procedural memory. Hippocampus also plays role in spatial memory and navigation. Many hippocampal neurons have “place fields” and the discovery of place cells in 1970’s led to the theory that hippocampus might act as cognitive
Case studies of patients with brain damage/abnormalities and animal models of human memory have informed our understanding of biological bases of human memory. The case study of patient H.M. the hippocampus and the medial temporal lobe were removed. Memory prior to surgery was intact that lead us to believe that long term memory storage is elsewhere. H.M. had perfectly good short-term memory therefore short-term memory storage is elsewhere. However, short-term memories cannot be converted to long-term memory therefore hippocampus and medial temporal lobe are essential to convert short-term to long-term. H.M. could learn motor tasks so hippocampus and medial are not involved with implicit memories but with rather explicit memories (Brain Regions
Wheeler, M. A., Stuss, D, t., & Tulving, D. (1997). Toward a theory of episodic memory: The frontal lobes and autonoetic consciousness: Psychological Bulletin, 121, 331-354
Recent research suggests that the mere act of retrieving a memory can temporarily make that memory vulnerable to disruption. This process of “reconsolidation” will typically restabilize the neural representation of the memory and foster
Some scientists hypothesize that memory transience is required to survive in an incredibly stimulating and ever-changing environment, and that when confronted with a changing environment transience serves to allow for more flexible behavior and better problem solving while in a stimulating environment transience can serve prevent the overfitting of peculiar occurrences. Without the mechanism of transience, a brain confronted with a new or unknown environment could be subject to inflexible behavior patterns and make incorrect, possibly detrimental decisions based on flawed predictions. A system that does not have a way to adapt to new surroundings can not survive in an ever-changing world. Memory persistence without transience will not work because it lacks behavioral flexibility since a neural circuit that can only maintain old memories will struggle to learn new information, especially if this new information conflicts with previously established ideas.