The hippocampus is a key human brain structure involved in consolidating new long-term memories.
Located in the medial temporal lobe, the hippocampus helps organize and stabilize memories of events and facts. It is especially important for episodic memory, which concerns personally experienced events, and for aspects of spatial memory and navigation. Memories are not stored in the hippocampus in the same simple way that files are stored on a computer; broader networks across the brain participate in long-term storage.
The hippocampus became famous through the case of Henry Molaison, often identified in scientific literature by his initials H.M. After surgery affecting both hippocampi in 1953, he had severe difficulty forming many new conscious memories, while some older memories and motor learning remained possible.
The hippocampus is not the brain’s only memory structure. The amygdala contributes emotional significance, the prefrontal cortex supports strategic retrieval, and the cerebellum helps with some forms of motor learning. This division of labor explains why memory is a network function.