The hippocampus is THE area in the #brain responsible for memory 🌳 We learned a great deal about the role of the hippocampus from a now-famous patient known as H.M. H.M. was a patient in the 1950's in whom the hippocampus was surgically removed as a last-resort treatment for epilepsy. After the operation, he suffered from a sudden and then-unpredicted permanent side effect of anterograde amnesia (aka the inability to form new memories 😱). For the rest of his life, H.M. was unable to remember new faces or learn new words, despite otherwise performing quite normally in other facets of intellectual capacity. As unfortunate as his case was, it was H.M. who taught us the importance of the hippocampus in memory encoding and retrieval. . While we traditionally think of the brain as an area where cells don't divide or regenerate, we now understand the hippocampus to be a unique site where new neurons (aka brain cells) are formed even in adulthood. And the hippocampus operates under a use-it-or-lose-it principle. Keeping our brains active 💪, whether through work, reading, crossword puzzles, playing musical instruments, is correlated with increased hippocampal volume, and similarly (and perhaps unsurprisingly) a lower risk of dementia later in life. . Active brain, new neurons, and brain health for days (and by days I mean many many years 😊☀️) . 📸: Tamily Weissman, Jeff Lichtman, and Joshua Sanes (2005)
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