Where Imagination Lives in Your Brain

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• Imagination as a Fundamental Function of the Hippocampus

• because imagination depends largely, if not exclusively, on memory

• there is absolutely no way you can imagine anything without the past

• combining bits and pieces of experience with emotions, inner commentary and things people have read or heard about

• Memory is a form of imagination

• From an evolutionary perspective, we are reasonably sure that the purpose of memories is actually in the future

• Memories allow you to take experiences that you have and retrieve them to make predictions about what will happen next

• We also need to form memories of our simulations of the future so that when we have an experience, we have something to draw on

• We have found that the encoding of an imagined simulation also involves the hippocampus

• The firing patterns of place cells repeat about eight times per second in rats, forming what is called the theta rhythm

• the place it just was, its current position and, late in the cycle, a possible upcoming location.

• H M. lacked a sea-horse-shaped brain structure called the hippocampus and had amnesia. His case helped establish the hippocampus as an engine of memory