The hippocampus and remote autobiographical memory.
In Newsdesk (August, 2005),1 new evidence for the neuroanatomy of remote memory was reported. On the basis of the findings of the US team lead by Larry Squire,2 remote autobiographical memory was suggested to be independent of the medial temporal lobe but dependent on the neocortex. By contrast with previous hypotheses, this new proposal predicts that after damage to the medial temporal lobe only recent autobiographical memories should be impaired in neurological patients, whereas loss of both recent and old autobiographical memories implies additional damage in the neocortex. However, there is evidence not included in the Newsdesk article, that is problematic for this new prediction. Two p…