Word: hippocampus
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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...
...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...
...monkeys and rhesus monkeys, all of which are closer to us on the evolutionary scale than are mice (except in Kansas). The real payoff came late last year, when Fred Gage at the Salk Institute and his colleagues in Sweden reported that nerve cells are regenerated in the human hippocampus (a portion of the brain related to memory and learning...
Damasio cites the case of a young woman who at age 30, shortly after the birth of her second child, entered a netherworld of nonstop epileptic seizures. The seizures damaged a region of the brain called the hippocampus, so that afterward she could no longer recall the simplest things, like having put clothes in the washer or having given her kids permission to visit friends. For six years she has lived in a free-floating present, unable to form new memories or envision the future. Her extended consciousness has been sadly diminished...
...Damasio and his wife Hanna, his closest collaborator, such patients are windows into the brain. Their seizures, strokes and diseases, while damaging the hippocampus, leave core consciousness unimpaired. That's because it evolved much earlier than extended consciousness, Damasio says, and thus is dependent on more ancient structures, especially those located within the brain stem and hypothalamus. Among the most important: a large region called the cingulate cortex, which not only receives sensory input from the skin, muscles and internal organs but also sends out signals to initiate movement and focus attention, as when emotions send our blood pressure soaring...