Word: hippocampus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...while the amygdala is busy telling the body what to do, it also fires up a nearby curved cluster of neurons called the hippocampus. (A 16th century anatomist named it after the Greek word for seahorse.) The job of the hippocampus is to help the brain learn and form new memories. And not just any memories. The hippocampus allows a rat to remember where it was when it got shocked and what was going on around it at the time. Such contextual learning helps the poor rodent avoid dangerous places in the future. It probably also helps it recognize what...
...average, much larger than those of their unaffected peers. Perhaps they just had more fear circuits to contend with? Neuroscientists are tempted to say yes, but they admit the conclusion is pretty speculative. Another group of researchers found that patients with post-traumatic stress disorder had a smaller hippocampus than normal. Perhaps their stressful experiences had somehow interfered with the hippocampus' ability to make new memories and, just as important, forget the old ones? Again, no one knows for sure...
...Medical School, has examined postmortem tissue from the brains of nearly 30 autistic individuals who died between the ages of 5 and 74. Among other things, she has found striking abnormalities in the limbic system, an area that includes the amygdala (the brain's primitive emotional center) and the hippocampus (a seahorse-shaped structure critical to memory). The cells in the limbic system of autistic individuals, Bauman's work shows, are atypically small and tightly packed together, compared with the cells in the limbic system of their normal counterparts. They look unusually immature, comments University of Chicago psychiatrist Dr. Edwin...
There is also preliminary evidence suggesting that a diagnosis of MCI can be confirmed with a magnetic-resonance scan of the brain. Typically, in cases of what turns out to be pre-Alzheimer's MCI, these images will reveal that the hippocampus, a central portion of the brain associated with short-term memory, is somewhat smaller than normal or even rather shrunken in appearance...
...terms of forming those memories of facts you are trying to cram, that happens in the hippocampus," Stickgold says. "The first recording in the hippocampus is very fast and reliable. But if you don't get sleep afterward, you may not get the memories into the neocortex...