Faculty meeting and then headed for the mountains

I’ve been invited today to deliver some comments and do a Q&A by the Institute faculty. After that, I’m headed off to our mountain house for the weekend. While I’m there, I’m going to continue working on a course for next semester on hippocampal function. Interestingly, while much has been written over the years about the mammalian hippocampus, the evidence for what its current function is (in humans) remains somewhat unclear. It most certainly isn’t the “memory” center of the brain, although it pretty clearly plays some important role in mnemonic neurobiology. But it certainly is an aesthetically striking structure, so much so, that it practically pleaded for a functional explanation as soon as it was examined and described histologically by Cajal and his contemporaries. It is also extraordinarily well-embedded in the brain’s system of network connections. So well-embedded in fact that one might devise many “just-so” stories for hippocampal function and seem to be quite reasonable.