Word: hippocampus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This much seems clear: the traces of memory--or engrams, as neuroscientists call them--are first forged deep inside the brain in an area called the hippocampus (after the Latin word for seahorse because of its arching shape). Acting as a kind of neurological scratch pad, the hippocampus stores the engrams temporarily until they are transferred somehow (perhaps during sleep) to permanent storage sites throughout the cerebral cortex. This area, located behind the forehead, is often described as the center of intelligence and perception. Here, as in the hippocampus, the information is thought to reside in the form of neurological...
...1960s seemed to support the belief that the supply of neurons is fixed at birth. Hence the surprise when Elizabeth Gould and Charles Gross of Princeton University reported last year that the monkeys they studied seemed to be minting thousands of new neurons a day in the hippocampus of their brain. Even more jarring, Gould and Cross found evidence that a steady stream of the fresh cells may be continually migrating to the cerebral cortex...
...your spouse over directions. Researchers at the University of Ulm in Germany scanned the brains of men and women as they tried to escape a 3-D virtual-reality maze and found that the sexes use different parts of the brain to process directions. Men relied on their left hippocampus and used geometry to find their way. Women used their right frontal cortex, trusting memory to keep landmarks in mind...