Question: What is the hippocampus?

Simon Bennett answered on 14 Jun 2011:

Hello,

Everybody has two hippocampi (the plural of hippocampus) that are located deep within each hemisphere of the brain. The name means seahorse, this is because the first people to identify this region thought it looked like one. This area of the brain is very important for spatial reasoning and converting short-term memories into long-term-memories. This is made apparent in people where due to illness or accident their hippocampi are damaged. These people can find it hard to work out how to fit things through holes for example. One man who had lost his hippocampi because of epilepsy could not form new long-term memories, he could remember stuff like phone numbers during the day but every morning when he woke up he could only remember up to the day before his brain was damaged.