i mean you can have memories even if you destroy most of the hippocampus. coyote: further insight into memory was uncovered when that very event occurred. dr. moffett: so, there's this guy who was one day found wandering along the side of the highway and the state policeman who picked him up asked him his name and he gave his name and said that he was stationed at a nearby army base and gave his age as 22 years old. and i don't know if the officer realized it or not but he must have appeared at least a decade older than that because he was and he didn't live at this army base anymore although he had been stationed there when he was about 22. and it turns out that he had just lost all of the memories of the last 11 years. gone! he didn't remember that he had had two kids. he thought that his wife was still just about to have the first kid and he had no memory of the second child, no memory of his post-military career, nothing. and it turned out that he had a cyst that was pressing on the conduit between the hippocampus and the rest of the brain. once the cys

we know that that's especially important in the hippocampus. hippocampul function is critical to memory. sueann: i thought i was losing my mind. here i had cancer and if that weren't bad enough i couldn't you know, handle daily things. and it affected my enjoyment of things as well. you know, i couldn't read a book, i couldn't get through a chapter of a book. so, it was a little frightening, and i wasn't sure if this was going to last, because i have heard that chemo brain can persist and in some people and i didn't know if i was going to be one of those people. merzenich: and we know from actually looking at the brains of people that have gone through chemotherapy. that they are responding abnormally, and they're responding abnormally in these critical centers that relate to memory to remembering, that relate to controlling the representation of information that's coming in rapid sequences or is played out in their actions in rapid sequences. so, just like an older person the brains of someone whose been through this chemical poisoning, and th