Category: function

Putting together a hippocampal function course

The current project is preparing a course for both undergraduates and doctoral students in neuroscience for next semester on the function of the hippocampus. For many in the field, this is an already answered question–the hippocampus is the biological substrate for human episodic memory. Others see it still as the neuronal seat of the so-called cognitive map. I’m not so sure. For all the experimental data collected on this beautiful brain structure over the years, the problem of biological function remains tantalizingly unclear.

Phenomena such as place cells, adult neurogenesis, theta phase precision, sequence learning and London Taxi Driver hypersized-hippocampi all are clues, but the detective story remains just that….a story.

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.

Jim