Abstract

INTRODUCTION The hippocampus is the most-studied part of the brain, attracting interest due to its position many synapses removed from sensory transducers or motor-e#ectors, its role in human amnesia and Alzheimer's disease, and the discovery of long term potentiation (LTP, see SYNAPTIC PLASTICITY) and of spatially coded cell firing. Bilateral damage to the hippocampus and nearby structures in patient H.M., as treatment for epilepsy, produced a profound retrograde and anterograde amnesia, prompting extensive cross-species research to uncover the specific memory deficit that results from hippocampal damage (the most prominent of which, in the rat, appears to be a deficit in spatial navigation). In short, the hippocampus has become the primary region in the mammalian brain for the study of the synaptic basis of memory and learning. Structurally, it is the simplest form of cortex. It contains one projection cell type, whose cell bodies are confined to a single layer, and receives inputs

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