HIPPOCAMPUS MEMORY BANK

Resembling a sea-horse, and truly an archive in the history of evolution — its most fascinating research results were an inspiration for decades, across generations of neuroscientists, and for many research labs world over.

Another unique novelty is its capacity to regenerate neurons, to cope with our perpetual demands for ever-increasing, epic proportions of data storage and analysis. These striking Spatial / Navigational skills are entwined well and formatted in the hippocampal-related networks.

A true “EUREKA” moment was when audible activity clicks were heard — as Place Cell excitation spikes were found always active in the same spatial zones of interaction. Since that discovery, a plethora of Place, Grid, Head Direction, Boundary, Vector, Speed, and Time cells have been found. This almost full range of functions is useful in understanding the spatio-temporal coding of information, and in building episodic memories.

Archicortex, in evolutionary language, is part of the Medial Pallium — meant to archive, integrate, and construct our spatiotemporal navigations. This became the central highway for memory records and recall. Evolutionary progress retained this “Core Memory Machine” to be integrated with any newly added neocortical developments.

Its utility forced capacity expansion in size — Dentate, CA3–CA1 loops. Pyramidal neurones were aligned into more than three layers of hippocampus, and a transition occurred by merger of additional layers. This communication highway became the busiest high-speed pathway in the brain. Loops and loops of circuits generated here would dwarf even the modern technology of back-propagations.

Hippocampus, Entorhinal Cortex, and Neocortex — this triad of bidirectional communicators in our natural brains defines real wonder, coping with the never-ending capacity of human episodic memory records. This is what gives real value.

The surgical removal of hippocampus for epileptic seizures, and also in post-trauma damage, in the landmark case of Patient ‘H.M.’, was a peeping moment into Pandora’s box of “Memory — Creation & Storage for Long-Term Use.”