![]() 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. One of the first drawings of a human hippocampus by Johannes Georg Duvernoy (1729).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. 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. 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 of commerce, represented by the horse, and seafaring, represented by the dolphin. After an earthquake, the city was submerged, and with it the temple of the God of the Sea, surrounded by his loyal, marble hippocampi. It is said that a temple to Poseidon was built thousands of years ago on a city on the Greek coasts called Helike. He was the man of horses, earthquakes and seas. Poseidon, God of the Sea, was carried across the oceans in a chariot pulled by hippocampi, who sometimes took him out of the water. In Greek mythology, hippocampi were sea monsters, similar to aquatic horses: with the head and front legs of a horse but the winding tail of a fish or dolphin. Hippocampi are fish of tiny, multiple fins, which flap hastily-fish that swim in an upright position. ![]() Before reproducing, two seahorses intertwine in an eight-hour dance, an essential part of their mating ritual. Its tail is long, prehensile and coiled in spiral, and its head resembles that of a horse. “Hippocampus” is the scientific name for the seahorse, an S-shaped fish with ringed, bony plates and a dorsal crest. ![]() Fernanda Pérez Gay Juárez, translated from Spanish by Álvaro García //
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