Word: hippocampus
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...remember trying to learn. Yet another region of the brain, an almond-size knot of neural tissue known as the amygdala, seems to be crucial in forming and triggering the recall of a special subclass of memories that is tied to strong emotion, especially fear. The hippocampus allows us to remember having been afraid; the amygdala evidently calls up the goosebumps that go along with each such memory...
...memory has been damaged by illness or injury. The most celebrated such individual is H.M. In 1953, when he was 27, he had drastic brain surgery to cure severe epilepsy. The operation cured his epilepsy, but removing parts of his brain's temporal lobes, including a structure called the hippocampus, destroyed his ability to form new memories. H.M., who is still alive, has a reasonably good short-term memory. Once introduced to a visitor, he will remember the person's name and other information while a conversation lasts. But if the visitor leaves and returns, H.M. has no memory whatsoever...
That sort of impairment has convinced scientists that the medial temporal lobe and hippocampus are key in transforming short-term memories into permanent ones, and also that permanent memories are stored somewhere else; otherwise, H.M. would have lost them...
...what Tsien & Co. did, focusing not just on the NMDA receptor but on a particular component of it. Called NR2B, it's very active in young animals (which happen to be good at learning), less active in adults (who aren't), and is found mostly in the forebrain and hippocampus (where explicit, long-term memories are formed). The researchers spliced the gene that creates NR2B into the DNA of ordinary mouse embryos to create the strain they called Doogie. Then they ran the mice through a series of standardized tests--sort of a rodent sat. In one, the mice were...
...results confirm a number of other studies made ?- but essentially ignored -- over the past 30 years, which saw the same growth occur in the same area of the brain in rats and birds. The hippocampus is our learning and memory center -? and in adult birds, it grew every time they learned new songs. Could lifelong education literally boost your brainpower? "We have to try to determine whether we might be able to have some positive control over how the human brain cells divide," said Dr. Fred Gage, the team leader. Not to mention whether this could help arrest the neurological...