Having sparse links in the hippocampus may maximize memory storage
Our brain’s memory center has a sleek design, new data show. The finding comes from looking at living human hippocampus tissue. This part of the brain plays a key role in learning and memory. The analyzed tissue revealed fairly few cell-to-cell links between the vast number of nerve cells in the hippocampus. But signals sent through those sparse links proved extremely reliable and precise. Cellular neuroscientist Peter Jonas led the new research. He works at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in Klosterneuburg. His team shared its findings January 23 in Cell. Peeking into the memory center The brains of all mammals have two hippocampi. One’s in the brain’s left hemisphere. The other is in the right. The brain has two hippocampi (red), one in each hemisphere. Anatomography/Life Science Databases(LSDB)/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.1 JP) Each hippocampus contains a smaller region known as the CA3 area. In humans, some 1.7 million nerve cells — called pyramidal cells — reside there. But much of what we know about these cells has come from studies in mice. And …