Hippocampus

Ø  The hippocampus named after its resemblance to the seahorse,

Ø  Is a major component of the brains of humans and other vertebrates.

Ø  Humans and other mammals have two hippocampi, one in each side of the brain.

Ø  Plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory and spatial navigation.

Ø  The hippocampus is located under the cerebral cortex; and in primates it is located in the medial temporal lobe, underneath the cortical surface..

Ø  In Alzheimer's disease, the hippocampus is one of the first regions of the brain to suffer damage.

2014 Nobel Prize Medicine Winners

·    John O’Keefe is a 74 yr old American-British Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College in  London.

·    In 1971, Dr. O’Keefe was studying the hippocampus, when during an experiment on rats he discovered that certain nerve cells got activated when the rat was in a particular spot. If the rat changed its place, then different nerve cells in the rat’s brain got activated.

·    This led to his conclusion that the cells weren’t just registering the location but they appeared to be making circuits that constituted an inner map or ‘GPS’ of the place.

·   He realized that the hippocampus was a spatial system where the memory of a certain place gets stored a particular combination of the nerve cells.

·    May-Britt and Edvard Moser

ð  May-Britt Moser aged 51 and Edvard Moser aged 52 are a married team of neuroscientists working at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.

ð  In 2005, the Mosers’ worked with O’Keefe to further his work. They conducted similar experiments on rats, where they discovered that nerve cells in entorhinal cortex which is near the hippocampus got activated when the animals passed certain places.

ð  These nerve cells together laid out a grid like pattern enabling the rat to navigate spatially.