Neocortical Memory Circuits
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
For many decades, the hippocampus and associated limbic areas of the mammalian central nervous system have been the structures most closely associated with memory (Scoville and Miner 1957; Mishkin 1982; Amaral et al. 1987). Indeed, the hippocampus is essential for acquiring and consolidating new knowledge about events, people, and places. In the unusual circumstance that both medial temporal lobes are damaged, as in the famous case of H.M., memory is reduced to that acquired before the injury (Scoville and Milner 1957); after suffering this type of injury, an individual is unable to remember most events for even a few minutes.
Other areas of the central nervous system are also important for memory processes. Among these, the prefrontal cortex has been consistently implicated in mnemonic functions (see, e.g., Warrington and Weiskrantz 1982; Fuster 1985; Kesner 1985; Milner et al. 1985), although the precise nature of these functions has been difficult to...
