Word: hippocampus
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...late adolescence, certain regions of their brains become more active when they face a potential social interaction. Specifically, when an older girl anticipates meeting someone new - someone she believes will be interested in her - her nucleus accumbens (which is associated with reward and motivation), hypothalamus (associated with hormone secretion), hippocampus (associated with social learning) and insula (associated with subjective feelings) all become more active. By contrast, boys in the same situation show no such increase in activity in these areas. In fact, the activity in their insula actually declines. (Read "The Truth About Teen Girls...
...Humans store memories in various regions of the brain, but neuroscientists have pinpointed one section deep within, a seahorse-shaped structure called the hippocampus, as particularly crucial to memory. Studies of patients with brain injury or disease have shown that the hippocampus is where new memories are formed and where recent ones are retrieved; like a librarian, it scans the brain's catalog of bygone information and brings appropriate material to the fore. (But a recent brain-scan study of 15 healthy adults at the University of California, San Diego, found that the hippocampus has less to do with memories...
...Alzheimer's, the hallmark plaques of the disease are known to target and clog the hippocampus and nearby regions first, which explains why the initial symptoms of the disease involve memory loss - and why early stage patients may have trouble remembering whether they ate breakfast that morning, but can still recognize friends from childhood. Though Berry does not yet have scientific evidence, she strongly believes that low-tech treatments like episodic photography can spark specific and targeted activity in the hippocampus, keeping it active for longer or even regenerating it - and perhaps allowing patients to hold on to new memories...
...surprise that the brain starts screaming chow time, and the PET scan showed that it was screaming loudly. Appetite and hunger are processed in a lot of regions - most notably the orbital frontal cortex, which is linked to self-control; the striatum, which is linked to motivation; the hippocampus, which is linked to memory; and the amygdala, which is linked to powerful emotions. In Wang's subjects, all these regions were ringing the dinner bell...
Exactly how diabetes is associated with cognitive deficits isn't clear, but there is evidence suggesting that certain areas of the diabetic brain - such as the amygdala, which processes emotions, and the hippocampus, which is related to memory - are smaller than normal, a difference that may affect learning and recall of information. Early studies have even suggested that these physical differences may also predict Alzheimer's disease. While Dixon's study did not find a difference between the diabetes patients and controls on memory skills, Jacobson says the connection between the two diseases is an area of intense research...