What happens when you remove the hippocampus?
What happens when you remove the hippocampus?
Welcome back student. Do you remember how you celebrated your last birthday, first day of your school and what you had in your dinner last night?
Well, you might remember all of them because all of these are stored inside your brain as memories. Remembering things and saving them as a memory so that we easily recall them when required is one of the prime functions of our brain.
Do you know in which corner of your brain is all these stored? No worries if you don’t because in this lesson you are going to learn about it.
The beginning
This was first discovered when a person named Henry Molaison suffered a skull crack in an accident and began having black outs and seizures. For his treatment he went to a famous surgeon William Skoville who treated him and removed his hippocampus. He felt fine after the surgery even his seizures and black outs stopped occurring but his long-term memory was cleared. For so many years Henry was treated and a research scholar conducted several experiments on him based on his short- and long-term memory.
Observations
After all the experiments on Henry the researchers understood several facts based on the storage of short- term and long-term memory. Henry never lived a normal life but he survived till the age of 82.
It is now clear that hippocampus is a complex brain structure embedded deep inside the temporal lobe. It plays an important role in learning and memory. Studies have shown that it also gets affected by neurological disorders.
I hope you found this interesting and might now understand more about the hippocampus and its relationship with our memory. Tell your friends about it and try to explore more.
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