Andrew Huberman· PhD
the hippocampus has this incredible storage capacity and ability to set context about past, present, and future.
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the hippocampus has this incredible storage capacity and ability to set context about past, present, and future.
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The hippocampus is controversial I mean it's the most studied area of the brain arguably except for maybe V1 — yeah and uh but I believe and my colleagues do I wrote a big paper with Howard I delate Howard ion bomb and andinus on this who — you know from Davis and uh we believe that it's about linking various experiences to a context and what I mean by that is you've got information about smell high level Vision high level semantic knowledge information right and the hippocampus is wiring is really set up to not understand what's going on so the late David maru's Pioneer in computational Neuroscience proposed that what the hippocampus is about is what he called Simple memory it's basically saying I know Andy huberman sorry is okay us to call me Andy that's fine yeah long story it's a Davis thing you would understand so — so I know Andy huberman right but to have a memory of this moment that's separate from let's say I saw you at some Neuroscience Retreat when we were in uh when you were in grad school I have to have some part of the brain that doesn't know who you are to some extent right because I got to keep them separate and so there are the hippocampus what it'll do is it'll form a memory that's not an Andy huberman memory it's an Andy in this place at this time in this context and that's what allows it to support what's called episodic memory which is your ability to say I went to Washington DC once and I remember going to the Smithsonian as opposed to your knowledge about what generally happens in Washington DC oh the president's there oh that's where a lot of politics happen oh the Smithsonian is a place in DC it's a memory of your being there at a particular place and time
What the hippocampus is important for is what we've already talked about associating things together writ large. Anytime you need to associate something together either for your past your present or your future you are using your hippocampus and it takes on this much more important role in our cognitive lives when we think about it like that.