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... ... middle of paper ... ...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. References Cipolotti, L., & Bird, C. M. (2006). Amnesia and the hippocampus. Current opinion in neurology, 19(6), 593-598. Eichenbaum, H., Otto, T., & Cohen, N. J. (1992). The hippocampus—what does it do? Behavioral and neural biology, 57(1), 2-36. Min, K. J., Hyun, K. D., Lee, Y., Jin, P. S., & Hoon, R. J. (2014). Distinct roles of the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex in GABAA receptor blockade-induced enhancement of object recognition memory. Brain research.
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Show MoreThe 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.
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.
Spiers, H., & Bendor, D. (2014). Enhance, Delete, Incept: Manipulating hippocampus-dependent memories. Brain Research Bulletin,
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 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,
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.
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 damages 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.
After looking though different slides I found an interesting region in the brain. The slide consisted of a the brain cut on the sagittal plane which results in a division of the left and right side of the brain into two equal parts. When finding this area of interest in the mouse brain atlas, it was found to be a couple of sub regions of the hippocampus: CA1 and CA3. After briefly mentioning the importance of these two sub regions, I will focus my attention on the hippocampus as a whole.
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
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
Wessinger, C.M., Clapham, E. (2009) Cognitive Neuroscience: An Overview , Encylopedia of Neuroscience. 12(4) 1117-1122.
In the field of cognitive neuroscience a memory study usually involves a combination of behavioral tasks and a machine that permits t...
Making and storing memories is a complex process involving many regions of the brain. (3). Most experts agree that we have two stages of memories - short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory is the immediate memory we have when we first hear or perceive someth...
One more case study that helped inform us about human memory was patient E.P. who was diagnosed with viral encephalitis. Consequently he had a bilateral hippocampus destruction. He was unable to form new memories and lacked semantic knowledge. This study shows how damage to the hippocampus disrupts the formation of new explicit memories (Brain Regions in Memory, slide
In opposition, this study may not be supported by healthy skepticism. The first argument presented on K.C., is a rare finding that has never been seen before. It is difficult to support a claim on one single account of the episodic memory being lost. The second argument, on the brain study, is equally hard to accept. Tulving, the researcher