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Hippocampal Memory: An Internet Based Look Essays

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Hippocampal Memory: An Internet Based Look

The belief that the brain is a box and is made up of various boxes communicating with each other is one that can be quite useful to understanding various aspects of the human experience. It would explain why there are time delays in messages going from one point to another. It also allows for a theory of localization. Localization states that various functions of cognition are held in specific areas of the brain. Looking at the brain as a group of areas communicating to each other to allow the organism to interact and function within its environment, is quite similar to looking at it as a box which has little boxes within it talking to each other. One aspect of the human experience that might …show more content…

While rats with different lesions did not suffer the same deficit.(http://www.idealibrary.com)

It has been found that the hippocampus might be an intermediary between the neo-cortex's representations and the filing away of information into long term memory. This would go along with the idea of various components of the nervous system communicating with each other to create inputs and outputs. In one study, rats were presented with food only if a tone and a light were presented together. Rats which had received a lesion to the hippocampus had a hard time learning the conditioned response to obtain the food. This finding might lead one to the idea that the lesion affected the animal's ability to remember or retrieve the information that would tell it to perform the response and get food. Animals when trained to a fearful stimulus in a specific context will become conditioned to the context, they will begin to fear the context in which the fearful stimulus is given. Animals with hippocampal lesions do not gain this context conditioning. Or rather, they do not gain a fear of the context of the situation where fearful shocks are given. (http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.eichenbaum.html) This prompted some researchers to think that the hippocampus may have something to do with our ability to remember context, or context cues that surround us in the real world.

Another study done

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