Do you need a hippocampus to imagine a museum?
As we explored in the very first Mind Matters post, neuroscientists everywhere agree that the hippocampus is crucial to memory -- but have rich and interesting disagreements about how this brain area creates and manages memory and what roles it might play in cognition. This debate was freshly enlivened in early 2007 when an innovative paper by Demis Hassabis (a former chess prodigy and games designer) and colleagues at the renowned University College London lab of Eleanor Maguire proposed that the hippocampus is vital not just for memory but also for imagination. As hippocampal researcher Andre Fenton notes in his review below, this discovery suggests both a vital new role for the hippocampus and a narrative-building mechanism common to memory, imagination, and thought. Interesting new ground, Fenton finds, but not without its hazards.
clipped from blog.sciam.com
