I have come across her a couple times: There she goes, I think, legendary and smiling, her back mildly arched by age resembling the ringed curvature of a seahorse’s tail.Īs part of my work with Brain Reach, a McGill University initiative to disseminate science, once a week I talk to ten-year-old children about the brain. 3,4 Brenda Milner, who turned 100-years old last year, is still active at the Montreal Neurological Institute. When neuropsychologist Brenda Milner later performed tests and memory exercises on this patient, she discovered that memory systems rely deeply on the temporal lobes, which hold the hippocampi in their depths. The initials of that man are HM -indelible letters in the history of neuroscience. The man’s epilepsy was cured, but from that moment on, he was unable to set in new memories. In the 1950s, the acclaimed surgeon William Scoville operated on a man with intractable epilepsy and removed part of his temporal lobes, along with his hippocampi. Today, living in the boom of neuroimaging and powerful programs of statistical analysis, I am sometimes envious of those men who, prying into the morphology of the brain, saw seahorses on its surface. ![]() The early neuroanatomists were on the verge of art and science, relying on drawings and poetic descriptions of the specimens they worked on throughout their studies. In the sixteenth century, when anatomist Giulio Cesare Aranzio observed these horns located alongside the ventricles of the brain, he was unsure whether to call them “hippocampi” or “silk worms.” 1 He decided on the first option, conceding their resemblance to the seahorse, or perhaps inspired by Greco-Roman mythology.Īfter hours of analyzing figures that reflect patterns of electrical activity in the brain, I am struck by the subtitle of an article on the history of the brain’s anatomy in a neuroscientific journal: “From poetics to statistics: evolving from visual inspection and verbal descriptions to observer independent metrics.” 2 This is a reference to the way in which our acquisition and description of knowledge has changed: Before technology advanced enough to have objective and quantitative measurements of the nervous systems, anatomy was the main approach to the brain. They are an essential part of the brain apparatus that consolidates new memories and weighs possible outcomes. Folded into a semi-circular structure, the hippocampal neurons string together past and future. ![]() Humans and other mammals have two hippocampi two symmetrical curved halves, one in each cerebral hemisphere. In neuroscience, the hippocampus is a structure hidden within the temporal lobe of the brain. Their coins bore hippocampi: swimming horses, some of them winged. For the Phoenicians, the hippocampus held the combination ofĬommerce, represented by the horse, and seafaring, represented by the dolphin. After an earthquake, the city was submerged,Īnd with it the temple of the God of the Sea, surrounded by his loyal, marble Said that a temple to Poseidon was built thousands of years ago on a city on He was the man of horses, earthquakes and seas. Poseidon, God of the Sea, wasĬarried across the oceans in a chariot pulled by hippocampi, who sometimes took Monsters, similar to aquatic horses: with the head and front legs of a horseīut the winding tail of a fish or dolphin. Hippocampi are fish of tiny, multipleįins, which flap hastily-fish that swim in an upright position. Before reproducing, two seahorses intertwine in an eight-hour dance, anĮssential part of their mating ritual. Tail is long, prehensile and coiled in spiral, and its head resembles that of a Seahorse, an S-shaped fish with ringed, bony plates and a dorsal crest. “Hippocampus” is the scientific name for the ![]() Fernanda Pérez Gay Juárez, translated from Spanish by Álvaro García //
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