Will self and his inner seahorse

Abstract

Remembering the past, navigating the present, and imagining the future rely on a brain structure known as the hippocampus (O’Keefe and Nadel 1978; Hassabis et al. 2007; Spiers 2012). Its name comes from the Latin for seahorse, which it looks similar to. It lies buried deep in each hemisphere of the brain. Damage to the hippocampus prevents the formation of new memories and thus has a dramatic impact on the ability to navigate newly encountered environments (Scoville and Milner 1957; Spiers et al. 2001a) or remember what happened in different places (Spiers et al. 2001b; Spiers 2012).