Hippocampus Thomas Henry Huxley and Richard Owen, satirised as the Great Hippocampus Question. The term hippocampus minor fell from use in anatomy textbooks, and was officially removed in the Nomina Anatomica of 1895. Today, the structure is just called the hippocampus, with the term "Cornu Ammonis" surviving in the names of the hippocampal subfields CA1-CA4. The term "limbic system" was introduced in 1952 by Paul MacLean to describe the set of structures that line the edge of the cortex (Latin "limbus" meaning "border"): These include the hippocampus, cingulate cortex, olfactory cortex, and amygdala. Paul MacLean later suggested that the limbic structures
Hippocampal memory encoding and retrieval Hippocampal memory encoding and retrieval The hippocampus participates in the encoding and retrieval of memories. The hippocampus is located in the medial temporal lobe (subcortical), and is an infolding of the medial temporal cortex. The hippocampus plays an important role in the transfer of information from short-term memory to long-term memory during encoding and retrieval stages. These stages need not occur successively, but are, as studies indicate, broadly divided in the neuronal mechanisms they require or even in the hippocampal areas they activate. According to Gazzaniga, "encoding is the processing of incoming information that creates memory traces to be stored."