Medicine and Health

Concept and location neurons in the human brain provide the ‘what’ and ‘where’ in memory formation

S. Mackay, T. P. Reber, et al.

Our brains create new memories by capturing the ‘who/what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’. Measuring single-neuron activity in the human medial temporal lobe during item–location encoding, the team found two specialized groups—hippocampal, amygdala and entorhinal concept cells, and parahippocampal location-selective neurons—whose higher firing predicted successful encoding, supporting hippocampal indexing and linking the ‘what’ and ‘where’. Research conducted by Sina Mackay, Thomas P. Reber, Marcel Bausch, Jan Boström, Christian E. Elger, Florian Mormann.