Both sources of information are needed to self-regulate one's own behaviors but internal mnemonic sources are crucial to resist enslavement to external and salient events (p. 72)."
While McNamara has explained the technical functions taking place in the hippocampus, he ends his explanation above by helping us understand, in short, the hippocampus is our "self-regulation" of our behavior, or our personality (p. 72). It is how we, or others, might describe us.
Injury or disease can interrupt or alter the processes taking place between the frontal systems and the posterior parietal systems, and since the frontal lobes rely on processing information, including memories, damage can result in how that information is processed and can impact, of course, the personality since the hippocampus is the regulator of personality (p. 72).
McNamara says:
The frontal lobes were only supposed to assist other neuroanatomical structures (e.g., the hippocampus) in doing the real work of memory. The role of the frontal lobes was restricted to helping develop strategies to facilitate encoding, storage, or retrieval. Patients with frontal lobe dysfunction, for example, do not spontaneously use categorization or chunking strategies to memorize large amounts of material. They do not efficiently encode contextual information, such as time and place, surrounding an event (or an experimental trial). They do not easily recall where or how they acquired or learned a new piece of information (source amnesia), nor can they say which piece of information, among an array of similar items, they learned most recently. Finally, patients with frontal lesions are not as proficient as controls at making judgments and predictions about their own memory abilities. All of these deficits seem to involve memory operations, rather than memory content per se, so it is not surprising that before the advent of PET scanning, the role of the frontal lobes in memory was assumed to be important but indirect and peripheral to the main action (p. 74)."
As our understanding of memory and how it stored, retrieved begins to take shape, we readily see that there is much more to memory, memory storage, and memory retrieval than probably most people might have thought there was to it. But the understanding the hippocampus, our personality, where it comes from and how it works with our memory in the way we respond to stimuli is just a small part of the overall process.
Learning and Memory
Old theories and beliefs about memory and the brain have been revised over the past two decades of research. Technology has contributed to this revised understanding, and what has been learned thanks to the technological advances in medicine and science are intriguing and fascinating insights into how memory works. Judy Willis (2007) discusses these new insights, saying:
It was a long-held misconception that brain growth stops with birth and is followed by a lifetime of brain cell death. Now we know that although most of the neurons where information is stored are present at birth, there is lifelong growth of the supporting and connecting cells that en rich the communication between neurons. These "dendrites" sprout from the neuron's arms (axons) or cell body (p. 310)."
While this new information is still being studied and analyzed, certain tests have, as reported by Willis, shown that certain learning activities, such as learning to juggle or learning a second language, produce certain changes in the brain (p. 310). Willis says that engaging in learning actually increases one's capacity to learn (p. 310). However, when learning ceases, for instance, when the juggler stops juggling, the result is that the chemical (in the case of juggling) the gray matter that was created by the brain and directly associated with juggling, ceased being created by the brain. The juggling was the stimuli that created the chemical creation and release of the gray matter in the brain that was observed in the occipital lobes, or the visual memory areas (p. 310). In other words, in the instance of juggling, the juggler would have had a greater degree of visual memory ability as a result of the activity of juggling; when the activity ceased, so did the increased ability that existed in the visual memory relationship (p. 310).
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