Its gettin' Brainy !!!!

Discovery Science is back ! :D
Well I saw this episode in December and had planned to post this on my blog but didn't got much time.But finally here it is!

This episode of "Dark Twisted Matters" was about Hippocampus. Basically it is one of the major components of our brain.It controls our memory , let it be short or long !

Well the episode was about telling the importance of this part of brain.

Some people use to suffer from brain attacks or say Epilepsy (a better word) .It is a common and diverse set of chronic neurological disorders characterized by seizures (disturbed Brain activity). It occurs due to increase in amount of calcium in hippocampus.So there was some scientist ( I don't remember his name obviously ! ) he wanted to find the reason behind this. So he figured out that it was all because of the excess amount of calcium in hippocampus(there were some other reasons too but I remember only this one :) ) . He thought of removing this part and wanted to know consequences of doing that. So surgery was done and the part was removed successfully and the person was alive ( I was surprised because it was a major surgery ! ).

Well surgery was successful but its consequences were dreadful !

The person had lost his short term memory.He was not able to tell what he had for lunch ! He was not able to recognize new people he met since that day.

The scientist was extremely sorry for whatever happened but from this everyone got know about the role of hippocampus. That guy was not even able to tell about the past family holidays trips he had enjoyed.
So the conclusion came that this part of brain deals with the short and long term memory and solution of stroke is definitely not removing this part of the brain!

Some further experiments had also been performed on him.It is to be said that our brain has two parts , one is declarative and the other one is procedural.
Declarative is all about the memory stuff that this person had lost.But procedural is all about the movements you perform with your body parts.

A special room was been made for him in which there were no mirrors.It is so because he used to think that his age is still 21 because of his memory loss but the fact was that he was growing old and he had no clue about this.

One experiment was performed on him.

It was that he was given a hand exercise to perform.Scientists knew that his declarative part was damaged but they wanted to know about the procedural one ! First day he performed this exercise , it was to move a pencil in a particular direction (was something like that ! ) he didn't performed it well on the very first day.
Then the second day again the same thing was given to him to do,he performed it better this time and in few days he became an expert !

So it was notified that hippocampus had nothing to do with the brain's procedural part ! A person can perform various actions with his parts and that has nothing to do with the memory it all depends on how often he performs them.
For example we type ... we write... this has nothing to do with hippocampus ! 

Well that person had suffered from a big loss but in spite of this the whole world learned lots of things and for this that person is still appreciated !

He died at the age of 83 due to heart attack I guess.

So this came to the end of the episode !

Part of that Episode available on Youtube :