Most Detailed Mapping of Our Brains' Memory Bank Reveals Something Surprising

The most detailed map of the neural highways connecting the hippocampus and the rest of the brain has been created by scientists.

"We were surprised to find fewer connections between the hippocampus and frontal cortical areas and more connections with early visual processing areas than we expected to see."

While there's still a lot of debate over the precise role of the hippocampus in memory, neurologists believe it plays a key part in constructing memory and integrating it with our perception to allow us to make decisions about the future.

One day, a better understanding of how the hippocampus works with other parts of the brain could help us fight memory decline.

A high-resolution map of the connections between the hippocampus and cerebral cortex from the brains of seven adult females under the age of 35 years old was created using a new method of brain scans.

We have developed a method that will allow us to confirm where the different parts of the hippocampus are connecting. That has never been done in a living human brain.

White matter pathways are the highways of communication between different parts of the brain.

Different areas of the cortex are linked to different areas of the hippocampus. Our previous knowledge of these connections came from the dissection of primate brains.

The researchers found more connections in the visual processing area of the brain than in the frontal cortex.

It's possible that we haven't been able to resolve all those connections in humans yet, because the post-mortem analysis on non-human primate can detect things down to a cellular level.

It's possible that the human hippocampus has a smaller number of connections with frontal areas than we think, and more connections with visual areas of the brain.

The hippocampus plays an important role in memory, imagination and our ability to construct mental images in our mind's eye.

These areas of the brain have been associated with other studies. The team is curious to see if the patterns are the same for everyone.

Humans may have evolved different patterns of connection to facilitate human-specific memory and visualization functions, which may underpin human creativity.

We don't know what it is. We enjoy puzzles and will continue to investigate.

The research was published in a journal.