Study reveals critical role of perirhinal cortex in managing learning process
The famous patient Henry Molaison (long known as H.M.) suffered damage to his hippocampus after a surgical attempt to cure his epilepsy. As a result, he had anterograde amnesia, which meant that things he learned never made it past his short-term memory.
Though his memories of childhood remained intact, H.M. might meet with his doctor and five minutes later say, 'Oh, I don't think I've ever met you. What's your name?'.
H.M. helped scientists understand the role of the hippocampus in learning, but a mystery remains around how signals from it somehow get shared with the billions of neurons throughout the cortex that change in a coordinated fashion when we learn.