Thanks for the Memories …

HOW DOES MEMORY WORK? It turns out that there is one brain structure that appears to be a ‘memory maker’. Without it, we cannot remember anything that has happened to us, even from only a few minutes ago, let alone from last summer. Indeed, there was a very famous case of a patient named Henry Molaison (often referred to as H.M.), who had damage to his brain and was completely unable to form new memories. This kind of conditions, in which a person cannot make new memories, is called anterograde amnesia. The brain structure that is needed to form these kinds of memories, and which was damaged in Henry’s brain, is the hippocampus, a seahorse shaped brain region buried deep inside your head between your ears, as shown in the Figure 1.