by Giorgia Ragni
The hyppocampus is responsible for the brain cells' production, a process called Neurogenesis.
Professor Sandrine Thuret from the Neurogenesis and mental health lab at the king's college in london, declares that the Hyppocampus produces up to 700 new brain cells per day.
Memory, emotions, saddness, happiness and physical health conditions influence neurogenesis.
The Hyppocampus is a very important pair structure of the nervous system, located in both hemispheres and it is composed by gray matter.
It belongs to the limbic system; the limbic system is a brain structure entirety with a key role in emotional reactions, behavioural response, memory processes and in the sense of smell.
The Hyppocampus in order to be healthy and productive requires the right amount of sleep hours, it hates stress, it refuses a steady diet full of fats and proteins, it suffers when under the effect of drugs and alchool, It loves physical work out, sex and learning new things.
The hippocampus participates in the encoding and retrieval of memories. It plays an important role in the transfer of information from short-term memory to long-term memory during encoding and retrieval stages.
There are two steps to the encoding process: "acquisition" and "consolidation". During the acquisition process, stimuli are committed to the short term memory stage. Then, consolidation is where the hippocampus, along with other cortical structures, stabilize an object within the long term memory stage, a process strengthening over time and time again.
After encoding, the hippocampus is capable of going through the retrieval process. The retrieval process consists of accessing stored information; this allows learned behaviors to experience conscious depiction and execution.
Encoding and retrieval are both affected by neurodegenerative, anxiety disorders and epilepsy.
Tests involving the recall of paragraphs or strings of words, illustrate a degree of dysfunction among lesion patients proportionate to the percentage of hippocampal volume and the amount of cells lost.
Out of all areas in the brain, the hippocampus is among the first to be damaged by Alzheimer's. The difference between the hippocampus of an Alzheimer's patient and that of a normal patient was shown through the notable loss seen in cortical grey matter in Alzheimer's.
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