The Hippocampus (Direct Quotations from Text)

The left side works with facts; the right side works self-related episodic memory. The Hippo works closely with the other limbic systems such as the amygdala, to couple the details of an experience with the emotional tone and meaning of the event. 

The left side or hemisphere builds our factual and linguistic knowledge. The right side organizes the building blocks of our life story according to time and topic. 

These aspects of the hippo works make our “search engine” of memories more efficient. The hippo draws together the separate pieces of images and sensations of implicit memory into the assembled “pictures” of factual and autobiographical memory. To achieve success you must use a focused attention to activate the hippocampus. We have to assemble these implicit memories into explicit form in order to be able to reflect on their impact on our lives. 

The hippo goes off line in such cases as the consumption of alcohol where a person can be awake (though impaired) but does not encode experience into explicit form. Rage also shuts down the hippo, and folks out of control with anger may not be lying when they say they don’t recall what they said or did in that altered state of mind. 

Other states of high emotions beyond what we normally tolerate also shut off the hippo by way of high levels of stress they create. Excessive stress-hormone released in states of terror may disrupt the hippo integration. 

When the hippo is temporarily out of service the raw moment-to-moment fragments of the experience remain as free-floating implicit memory in disarray, The brains’ circuitry that encodes experience into perceptions, sensations and emotions remain active. 

Trauma shuts down the hippocampus for a time through the mechanism of dissociation. When faced with overwhelming experience or threat to our survival, when there is no possible physical escape, not only do we release high levels of memory-blocking stress hormones, but the brain may find another form of escape by aiming the narrow channel of focal attention away from the threat. Awareness becomes completely absorbed in some non-traumatic aspect of the environment, or in the interior landscape of the imagination. 

Bibliography (Click the link)