The neuroanatomy of amnesia: amygdala-hippocampus versus temporal stem.

Using a task known to be sensitive to human amnesia, we have evaluated two current hypotheses about which brain regions must be damaged to produce the disorder. Monkeys with bilateral transections of the white matter of the temporal stem were unimpaired, but monkeys with conjoint amygdala-hippocampal lesions exhibited a severe memory deficit. The results indicate that the hippocampus, amygdala, or both, but not the temporal stem, are involved in memory in the monkey and suggest that a rapprochement between the findings for the human and the nonhuman primate may be close at hand.