What is the role of conscious awareness in our ability to recall past events? A part of the brain called the hippocampus has been implicated in the processing of learning and memory, but, as a study in the September issue of Nature Neuroscience shows, the hippocampus plays an important part in processing memories of which we are not aware, as well as the ones that we can consciously call to mind. This work forms part of a change-of-mind among neuroscientists in which the hippocampus is not seen as the ?seat? of memory or awareness, but as a kind of master-of-ceremonies, coordinating various aspects of a memory - including our conscious awareness of an event having happened - and ?presenting? the package before our mind?s eye.
While they were both working at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, Marvin M. Chun - now at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee - and Elizabeth A. Phelps, of New York University, worked out how to test the role of the hippocampus in conscious memory by comparing how healthy subjects performed in memory tests alongside amnesiacs whose problems of recall stemmed from damage specific to the hippocampus.
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