Space and Memory | Lisa Giocomo

From Our Neurons to Yours

This week on From Our Neurons to Yours, we sit down with Stanford neurobiologist Lisa Giocomo to explore the intersection of memory and navigation.
This episode was inspired by the idea of memory palaces. The idea is simple: Take a place you're very familiar with, say the house you grew up in, and place information you want to remember in different locations within that space. When it's time to remember those things, you can mentally walk through that space and retrieve those items.
This ancient technique reveals something very fundamental about how our brains work. It turns out that the same parts of the brain are responsible both for memory and for navigating through the world.
Scientists are learning more and more about these systems and the connections between them, and it's revealing surprising insights about how we build the narrative of our lives, how we turn our environments into an internal model of who we are, and where we fit into the world.
Join us to learn more about the neuroscience of space and memory.
Learn more:

• About Lisa Giocomo’s research
• About the story of Henry Molaison (patient H. M.), who lost the ability to form new memories after epilepsy treatment removed his hippocampus.
• About the 2014 Nobel Prize in medicine, awarded to John O’Keefe and to May-Britt and Edvard Moser (Giocomo’s mentors) for their discovery of the GPS system of the brain.
• About Memory Palaces, a technique used since ancient times to enhance memory using mental maps.

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
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Chapter

1. Show intro (00:00:00)

2. Episode intro (00:00:28)

3. Guest intro (00:02:12)

4. The hippocampus and memory (00:03:12)

5. The hippocampus and navigation (00:06:58)

6. Linking memory and navigation (00:10:15)

7. Which came first? (00:13:12)

8. Observing memory maps in living animals (00:15:20)

9. Multiple maps (00:19:03)

10. Memory potency (00:20:55)

11. Experience into meaning (00:22:37)

12. Conclusion & credits (00:24:14)