Associative memory is the kind that makes you think of that night in Paris 20 years ago when you smell a rose. This kind of memory, it turns out, is not exclusive to humans. Instead, they respond to a wide range of perceptual, cognitive and behavioral events. Alzheimer's involves hippocampal damage and so-called global amnesia and sometimes follows brief loss of bloodflow to the brain, as occurs in heart attacks, he said. There is no consensus yet on the notion that any particular part of the hippocampus is more critical than another - but this is a controversial issue.
Global amnesia is suffered by people who have suffered damage to the hippocampus.
They typically can remember experiences that happened a long time before the brain damage but cannot recall newly learned facts and events. Prior to this study, the prevalent finding has been that hippocampal neurons encode information about an animal's locations in space. Now it appears they do much more than that. Our experiment used a novel technique to study the activation patterns of hippocampal neurons. Under these conditions, we found that hippocampal cells encoded all these important events at all the locations.