A Superb Update on a Key Region of the Brain

books:


	• The Hippocampus Book (Oxford Neuroscience Series) Oxford University Press, USA, 2006 - 872 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Hippocampus and Memory

Readers who are interested in this book, might want to look over an article published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, entitled:
"Hippocampal activation in patients with mild cognitive impairment is necessary for successful memory encoding" by T T Kircher et al.,
JNNP, 2007;78:812-818.
QUOTE (CONCLUSION) "These results suggest that in patients with MCI, an increase in MTL activation is necessary for successful memory encoding. Hippocampal activation may help to link newly learned information to items already stored in memory. Increased activation in MTL regions in MCI may reflect a compensatory response to the beginning of AD pathology".
[MCI = mild cognitive impairment; MTL = medial temporal lobe].

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A Superb Update on a Key Region of the Brain

I have been interested in the hippocampus - and indeed the whole limbic system - for many years and this is a superb review of our current knowledge about this essential region of the brain.

I was thinking that people who might be interested in this magnum opus will not need to be told what the hippocampus is. But for those of us who like to pick up things by browsing reviews, let me explain. It is a small part of the brain in the deep parts of the temporal lobes. It is named hippocampus because it is thought to resemble a seahorse. Although German pathologists were convinced that it looked more like a silk worm, so for years that's what the Germans called it.

It is primarily involved in the formation of new memories and in navigation. But despite its extreme importance it is easily damaged by hypoglycemia, anoxia or an array of toxins, particularly alcohol. It is also one of the first regions of the brain to suffer damage in Alzheimer's disease. Therefore the hippocampus has become one of the most widely studies regions in the brain, with almost 78,000 research papers at last count. Yet it is many years since there we last had a single comprehensive source of information on it.

It says in the preface that this book is an "attempt to provide a reasonably comprehensive review of hippocampal research, as viewed through many eyes and collected with a wide variety of methods.

The book consists of over 800 large pages and there are sixteen chapters by some of the biggest names in the field of "hippocampology."

1. The Hippocampal Formation, by Per Andersen, Richard Morris, David Amaral, Timothy Bliss, and John O'Keefe
2. Historical Perspective: Proposed Functions, Biological Characteristics, and Neurobiological Models of the Hippocampus, by Per Andersen, Richard Morris, David Amaral, Timothy Bliss, and John O'Keefe
3. Hippocampal Neuroanatomy, by David Amaral and Pierre Lavenex
4. Morphological Development of the Hippocampus, by Michael Frotscher and Laszlo Seress
5. Structural and Functional Properties of Hippocampal Neurons, by Nelson Spruston and Chris McBain
6. Synaptic Function, by Dimitri M. Kullmann
7. Molecular Mechanisms of Synaptic Function in the Hippocampus: Neurotransmitter Exocytosis, Glutamatergic, GABAergic and Cholinergic Transmission, by Pavel Osten, William Wisden, and Rolf Sprengel
8. Local Circuits, by Eberhard Buhl and Miles Whittington
9. Structural Plasticity, by Elizabeth Gould
10. Synaptic Plasticity in the Hippocampus, by Timothy Bliss, Graham Collingridge, and Richard Morris
11. Hippocampal Neurophysiology in the Behaving Animal, by John O'Keefe
12. Functional Roll of the Human Hippocampus, by Craig Stark
13. Theories of Hippocampal Function, by Richard Morris
14. Computational Models of the Spatial and Mnemonic Functions of the Hippocampus, by Neil Burgess
15. Stress and the Hippocampus, by Richard Morris
16. The Hippocampus and Human Disease, by Matthew Walker, Dennis Chan, and Maria Thom

This is the best book on the hippocampus that I know of in any of the major European languages. The editors acknowledge the two problems with the book. First the literature is enormous and growing day by day. Indeed, between the time that the book went to the printers and this review, almost 5,000 more papers have come out. Second the breadth of the field constantly expands, as new technologies and methods are applied to understanding it. So the authors and not only neuroscientists but also range from mathematicians to clinicians.

This is the "go to" book for anyone wanting to gain an understanding of this crucial region of the brain, and who needs to get their bearings before diving into that fast flowing river of new papers.

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The hippocampus is one of a group of remarkable structures embedded within the brain's medial temporal lobe. Long known to be important for memory, it has been a prime focus of neuroscience research for many years. The Hippocampus Book promises to facilitate developments in the field in a major way by bringing together, for the first time, contributions by leading international scientists knowledgeable about hippocampal anatomy, physiology, and function. This authoritative volume offers the most comprehensive, up-to-date account of what the hippocampus does, how it does it, and what happens when things go wrong. At the same time, it illustrates how research focusing on this single brain structure has revealed principles of wider generality for the whole brain in relation to anatomical connectivity, synaptic plasticity, cognition and behavior, and computational algorithms. Well-organized in its presentation of both theory and experimental data, this peerless work vividly illustrates the astonishing progress that has been made in unraveling the workings of the brain. The Hippocampus Book is destined to take a central place on every neuroscientist's bookshelf.

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