Historically, the earliest widely held hypothesis was that the hippocampus is involved in olfaction. This idea was largely motivated by a belief, later shown to be false, that the hippocampus receives direct input from the olfactory bulb.
There continues to be some interest in hippocampal olfactory responses, particularly the role of the hippocampus in memory for odors, but few people believe today that olfaction is its primary function.
Over the years, three main ideas of hippocampal function have dominated the literature: inhibition, memory, and space.
The behavioral inhibition theory (caricatured by O'Keefe and Nadel as "slam on the brakes!") was very popular up to the 1960s. It derived much of its justification from two observations: first, that animals with hippocampal damage tend to be hyperactive; second, that animals with hippocampal damage often have difficulty learning to inhibit responses that they have previously been taught. Jeffrey Gray developed this line of thought into a full-fledged theory of the role of the hippocampus in anxiety. The inhibition theory is currently the least popular of the three.
The second major line of thought relates the hippocampus to memory. Although it had historical precursors, this idea derived its main impetus from a famous report by Scoville and Brenda Milner describing the results of surgical destruction of the hippocampus (in an attempt to relieve epileptic seizures), in a patient named Henry Gustav Molaison, known until his death in 2008 as H.M. The unexpected outcome of the surgery was severe anterograde and partial retrograde amnesia: H.M. was unable to form new episodic memories after his surgery and could not remember any events that occurred just before his surgery, but retained memories for things that happened years earlier, such as his childhood. This case produced such enormous interest that H.M. reportedly became the most intensively studied medical subject in history.
In the ensuing years, other patients with similar levels of hippocampal damage and amnesia (caused by accident or disease) have been studied as well, and thousands of experiments have studied the physiology of activity-driven changes in synaptic connections in the hippocampus. There is now almost universal agreement that the hippocampus plays some sort of important role in memory; however, the precise nature of this role remains widely debated.
The third important theory of hippocampal function relates the hippocampus to space. The spatial theory was originally championed by O'Keefe and Nadel, who were influenced by E.C. Tolman's theories about "cognitive maps" in humans and animals. O'Keefe and his student Dostrovsky in 1971 discovered neurons in the rat hippocampus that appeared to them to show activity related to the rat's location within its environment. Despite skepticism from other investigators, O'Keefe and his co-workers, especially Lynn Nadel, continued to investigate this question, in a line of work that eventually led to their very influential 1978 book ''The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map''. As with the memory theory, there is now almost universal agreement that spatial coding plays an important role in hippocampal function, but the details are widely debated.
Role in memory
Psychologists and neuroscientists generally agree that the hippocampus has an important role in the formation of new memories about experienced events (episodic or autobiographical memory). Part of this role is hippocampal involvement in the detection of novel events, places and stimuli.
Some researchers view the hippocampus as part of a larger medial temporal lobe memory system responsible for general declarative memory (memories that can be explicitly verbalized—these would include, for example, memory for facts in addition to episodic memory).
Damage to the hippocampus does not affect some types of memory, such as the ability to learn new motor or cognitive skills (playing a musical instrument, or solving certain types of puzzles, for example). This fact suggests that such abilities depend on different types of memory (procedural memory) and different brain regions. Furthermore, amnesic patients frequently show "implicit" memory for experiences even in the absence of conscious knowledge. For example, a patient asked to guess which of two faces they have seen most recently may give the correct answer the majority of the time, in spite of stating that they have never seen either of the faces before. Some researchers distinguish between conscious ''recollection'', which depends on the hippocampus, and ''familiarity'', which depends on portions of the medial temporal cortex.
Role in spatial memory and navigation
Studies conducted on freely moving rats and mice have shown that many hippocampal neurons have "place fields", that is, they fire bursts of action potentials when a rat passes through a particular part of the environment. Evidence for place cells in primates is limited, perhaps in part because it is difficult to record brain activity from freely moving monkeys. Place-related hippocampal neural activity has been reported in monkeys moving around inside a room while seated in a restraint chair; on the other hand, Edmund Rolls and his colleagues instead described hippocampal cells that fire in relation to the place a monkey is looking at, rather than the place its body is located. In humans, place cells have been reported in a study of patients with drug-resistant epilepsy who were undergoing an invasive procedure to localize the source of their seizures, with a view to surgical resection. The patients had diagnostic electrodes implanted in their hippocampus and then used a computer to move around in a virtual reality town.
Place responses in rats and mice have been studied in hundreds of experiments over four decades, yielding a large quantity of information.
The discovery of place cells in the 1970s led to a theory that the hippocampus might act as a cognitive map—a neural representation of the layout of the environment. Several lines of evidence support the hypothesis. It is a frequent observation that without a fully functional hippocampus, humans may not remember where they have been and how to get where they are going: getting lost is one of the most common symptoms of amnesia. Studies with animals have shown that an intact hippocampus is required for some spatial memory tasks, particularly ones that require finding the way to a hidden goal. The "cognitive map hypothesis" has been further advanced by recent discoveries of head direction cells, grid cells, and border cells in several parts of the rodent brain that are strongly connected to the hippocampus.
Brain imaging shows that people have more active hippocampi when correctly navigating, as tested in a computer-simulated "virtual" navigation task. Also, there is evidence that the hippocampus plays a role in finding shortcuts and new routes between familiar places. For example, London's taxi drivers must learn a large number of places and the most direct routes between them (they have to pass a strict test, The Knowledge, before being licensed to drive the famous black cabs).
A study at University College London by Maguire, ''et al.''. (2000) showed that part of the hippocampus is larger in taxi drivers than in the general public, and that more experienced drivers have bigger hippocampi. Whether having a bigger hippocampus helps an individual to become a cab driver, or if finding shortcuts for a living makes an individual's hippocampus grow is yet to be elucidated. However, in that study Maguire, ''et al.''. examined the correlation between size of the grey matter and length of time that had been spent as a taxi driver, and found a positive correlation between the length of time an individual had spent as a taxi driver and the volume of the right hippocampus. It was found that the total volume of the hippocampus remained constant, from the control group vs. taxi drivers. That is to say that the posterior portion of a taxi driver's hippocampus is indeed increased, but at the expense of the anterior portion.
There have been no known detrimental effects reported from this disparity in hippocampal proportions. It can be distinguished as a zone where the cortex narrows into a single layer of very densely packed neurons, which curls into a tight S shape.
The structures that line the edge of the cortex make up the so-called limbic system (Latin ''limbus'' = ''border''): these include the hippocampus, cingulate cortex, olfactory cortex, and amygdala. Paul MacLean once suggested, as part of his triune brain theory, that the limbic structures comprise the neural basis of emotion. Most neuroscientists no longer believe that the concept of a unified "limbic system" is valid, though.
The hippocampus as a whole has the shape of a curved tube, which has been analogized variously to a seahorse, a ram's horn (Cornu Ammonis, hence the subdivisions CA1 through CA4), or a banana.
This general layout holds across the full range of mammalian species, from hedgehog to human, although the details vary. In the rat, the two hippocampi resemble a pair of bananas, joined at the stems. In human or monkey brains, the portion of the hippocampus down at the bottom, near the base of the temporal lobe, is much broader than the part at the top. One of the consequences of this complex geometry is that cross-sections through the hippocampus can show a variety of shapes, depending on the angle and location of the cut.
The entorhinal cortex (EC), the greatest source of hippocampal input and target of hippocampal output, is strongly and reciprocally connected with many other parts of the cerebral cortex, and thereby serves as the main "interface" between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain.
The superficial layers of the EC provide the most prominent input to the hippocampus, and the deep layers of the EC receive the most prominent output.
Within the hippocampus, the flow of information is largely unidirectional, with signals propagating through a series of tightly packed cell layers, first to the dentate gyrus, then to the CA3 layer, then to the CA1 layer, then to the subiculum, then out of the hippocampus to the EC. Each of these layers also contains complex intrinsic circuitry and extensive longitudinal connections.
The cortical region adjacent to the hippocampus is known collectively as the parahippocampal gyrus (or parahippocampus).
Further Reading
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