The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map

Human beings, since eons, have experienced a connection between the mental world and the physical world, specifically in terms of memory. To remember long speeches, the ancient Greek and Roman orators wandered through the “memory palaces” to modify and recollect the desired information. Likewise, in the contemporary era, to “place” or “store” long lists of numbers, names, and other pieces of information in one’s memory, a similar technique is exercised.

In the past few decades, research has revealed that for the metaphors of memory and navigation, there exists a physical source in the brain. A small, seahorse-shaped structure, the Hippocampus, is essential to both the functions.

Primarily, the Hippocampus maintains a continuous record of the events in one’s life, evaluates them in terms of their importance to the individual, and then stores the essential episodes in the Cerebral Cortex through the process of learning. Secondly, while the Hippocampus has traditionally been thought to only represent one’s current state – particularly in spatial tasks, such as navigation – this view gained significant traction with the discovery of “Place Cells” in the Hippocampus, which fire selectively when an individual is in specific locations (Stachenfeld, Botvinick& Gershman, 2017). This helps in creating mental representations of physical locations, generated by place cells as a result of anchoring of locations in which significant events occur, thus effortlessly aiding navigation in the real-world. Correspondingly, for the construction of complex mental maps, the Hippocampus is also involved in the process of Neurogenesis, whereby new neurons are formed in the brain to enhance learning and memory.

As stated by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, “the concept of space serves as the organizing principle by which we perceive and interpret the world, even in abstract ways”, emerging evidence suggests that the brain encodes abstract knowledge in the same way that it represents pragmatic information and positions in space. The Hippocampus also designs maps of abstract concepts such as creativity, friendships and relationships, among others, and stores them based on the dominant emotion experienced with those impressions.

Therefore, to conclude, the Hippocampus plays an essential role in capturing the indispensable and elemental instances that are responsible for crafting an individual’s core being.