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Krasnow Institute > Monday Seminars > Abstracts The Hippocampus--Larger than Life: Jeff Krichmar Despite thousands of published studies on the archicortical structure of the hippocampus, many of which have hinted at a possible role in learning and memory, hippocampal function remains at once both obscure and intriguing. One hypothetical function of the hippocampus, called Memory Indexing, is to build associations among disparate cell assemblies within the 6 layer neocortex. By this notion, the hippocampus links the often spatially disparate neocortical modules that make up a particular percept during the memory formation process. We are developing a model of the tri-synaptic hippocampus circuit to investigate the storage and retrieval capabilities of the Memory Indexing hypothesis. Our model makes use of novel computational approaches to allow for the construction of a large-scale representation (500 cells, 15 cell types, 500,000 compartments) of the hippocampal circuit. The model, based on current neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, will have a realistic morphology, physiological details to the channel level, and biochemical details down to the enzyme level. At this stage, the model is in a development phase. In the near future, we expect the model to reproduce the gamma and theta oscillations that are typical of the hippocampus and reproduce the cellular and sub-cellular changes observed in vivo and in vitro experiments.
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