Hippocampus function

Overview Your temporal lobe is a major part of processing input from multiple senses, as well as for how you store and retrieve memories, experience emotions and more. What is the temporal lobe? Your temporal lobe is a part of your brain that helps you use your senses to understand and respond to the world around you. It also plays a key role in how you communicate with other people, your ability to access memories, use language and process emotions. Function What does the temporal lobe do? Your temporal lobe contains areas of your brain that manage or contribute to several of your most useful abilities: language, memory and senses. You use these abilities constantly throughout your daily activities. Your temporal lobe contributes to these in the following ways: • Memory: Inside your temporal lobe is your hippocampus, which is essential for several memory-related processes and abilities. • Language: The temporal lobe gives you the ability to understand the meaning of words and objects. For instance, when you see a cup and recognize it as a container to drink out of, your temporal lobe is at work. Your temporal lobe is also home to Wernicke’s area, a part of your brain that helps you understand language and form meaningful sentences. • Emotions: Within your temporal lobe is the • Senses: Your temporal lobe processes signals from your senses, especially sight and sound. • Visual recognition: Certain regions of your temporal lobe are key to recognizing visual material such as...

Related: Live Science podcast "Life's Little Mysteries" 22: Mysterious brains What does the hippocampus do? The hippocampus is a heavily investigated part of the brain, but it wasn't until the 1950s that scientists were truly able to grasp what role it plays. In 1953, Henry Molaison consented to an experimental procedure allowing doctors to surgically remove his hippocampus and neighboring regions to address his epilepsy. The surgery stopped his seizures,but caused Molaison to develop a form of amnesia. He was able to form fresh memories but they lasted minutes, and he could no longer permanently store new information, according to neuroscientist Larry R. Squire's 2009 review of Molaison's case, published in the journal Neuron. Molaison described his state as "like waking from a dream … every day is alone in itself," Squire wrote. All Molaison could recall were events that occurred years before his surgery. Still, he did eventually improve his performance on certain motor tasks, such as the ability to draw a shape reflected in a mirror even though he had no recollection of ever having done it before. Molaison's case provided the first scientific evidence that there are multiple types of memory, and that the hippocampus acts in concert with other regions of the brain to encode and store memories. (Molaison lived for another 55 years after his surgery.) Data on Molaison, who went on to become themost intensively studied subject in neuroscience, alongside other patients with ...

You might recognize the word Learn more about this complex part of the brain and gain an understanding of how it works with the surrounding regions to process memories and help you navigate the world. What Is the Hippocampus? Like many parts of the brain’s limbic system, the hippocampus is involved in memory, learning, and emotion. Its largest job is to hold short-term memories and transfer them to long-term storage in our brains. It also plays a role in emotional processing, including anxiety and avoidance behaviors. The name of the hippocampus structure is derived from the Greek word for “seahorse” because the hippocampus is seahorse-shaped. Every brain has two hippocampi, with one on each side of the brain. The hippocampus is one of the most widely-studied structures in the brain because of its involvement in many What Does the Hippocampus Do? Originally, researchers thought that the hippocampus had something to do with olfaction (our The hippocampus’s primary role is to process memory, though. Because memory is involved in nearly everything we do, this structure is extremely important to everyday life. Because of its complex role, the hippocampus has connections to, and can “talk” to, several other parts of the brain. The following are important functions of the hippocampus. Storing memories. Declarative (factual) memories are the hippocampus’s strong suit. These memories include facts, dates, times, names, or locations. They're often immediate information like a perso...