Is the Hippocampus a Part of the Brain?

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There's a very famous patient who goes by KC in the literature who this patient had damaged the hippocampus and the medial temporal lobes. Despite retaining semantic knowledge, he could no longer remember any event from his personal life. And he could not imagine what would happen to him in the future. There is a tension there as well, which the brain has to navigate - when do I think about what’s going to happen next and when do I focus on the here and now? You have to have some kind of mechanism that performs that switching.

One of the most powerful of all human capacities is the ability to imagine ourselves in hypothetical situations at different times. We can remember the past, but also conjure up possible futures that haven’t yet happened. This simple ability underlies our capability to organize socially and make contracts with other people. Today’s guest, psychologist Adam Bulley, argues that it’s the primary feature that makes us recognizably human, as he argues in the new book The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight (with Thomas Suddendorf and Jonathan Redshaw).

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Adam Bulley received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Queensland. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Brain and Mind Centre and School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, and the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

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