Carlesimo Giovanni A
Department of Systems Medicine, Tor Vergata University, Rome, Italy; Clinical and Behavioral Neurology Laboratory, I.R.C.C.S. Santa Lucia Foundation, Rome, Italy.
Handb Clin Neurol. 2022;187:319-337. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-12-823493-8.00025-0.
Since the first description of the case of H.M. in the mid-1950s, the debate over the contribution of the mesial temporal lobe (MTL) to human memory functioning has not ceased to stimulate new experimental work and the development of new theoretical models. The early demonstration that despite their devastating memory loss patients with hippocampal damage are still able to learn a number of visuo-motor and visuo-perceptual skills at a normal rate and to be normally primed by verbal and visual material suggested that the term "memory" is actually an umbrella concept that includes very different brain plasticity phenomena and that MTL damage actually impairs only one of these. Subsequent research, which capitalized on a detailed anatomical description of MTL structures and on the close analysis of memory-related phenomena, tried to define the unique role of the MTL structures in brain plasticity and in the government of human behavior. A first hypothesis identified this role in the conscious forms of memory as opposed to implicit ones. In the last two decades, the emphasis has moved to the relational role of the hippocampus in binding together different pieces of unimodal information to provide unitary, multimodal representations of personal experiences.
自20世纪50年代中期首次描述H.M.的病例以来，关于内侧颞叶（MTL）对人类记忆功能的贡献的争论一直不断激发新的实验工作和新理论模型的发展。早期的研究表明，尽管海马体受损的患者记忆严重丧失，但他们仍能够以正常速度学习一些视觉运动和视觉感知技能，并能正常地受到言语和视觉材料的启动，这表明“记忆”这个术语实际上是一个总括性概念，它包括非常不同的脑可塑性现象，而MTL损伤实际上只损害其中之一。随后的研究利用对MTL结构的详细解剖描述以及对记忆相关现象的仔细分析，试图确定MTL结构在脑可塑性和人类行为调控中的独特作用。第一个假设将这个作用确定为在有意识的记忆形式中，而非隐性记忆形式中。在过去二十年中，重点已转向海马体在将不同的单峰信息结合在一起以提供个人经历的统一多峰表征方面的关系作用。
