Rolf Degen summarizing... Long after memories have been consolidated, the hippocampus acts as a librarian in the brain, picking up the traces of the past from their storage places

Inquiring the librarian about the location of memory. Gabriel Berdugo-Vega &Johannes Graeff. Cognitive Neuroscience, May 26 2022. https://doi.org/10.1080/17588928.2022.2076075

Abstract: Where memories are stored in the brain is an age-old question in psychology and neuroscience alike. In particular, whether hippocampus-encoded memories are transferred to the cortex or remain hippocampus-dependent over time has not been definitely answered. New evidence from fMRI studies in humans suggest that while hippocampo-cortical connections lose weight during declarative memory consolidation, the hippocampus – alongside corticocortical connections – stays equally engaged between recent and remote memory recall. These findings lend experimental support for the indexing theory of memory consolidation, which postulates the hippocampus to act as a librarian to retrieve the cortical books of memory.

Keywords: MemoryConsolidationIndexingfMRIHippocampus