Hippocampal Slow Waves, Learning, and Instinctive Behavior

Abstract

The idea that there is a localized cerebral area devoted to memory, and further, that the hippocampus is just such an area, had an enormous appeal to many people interested in brain-mind relations. Only two years after the appearance of Scoville and Milner’s 1957 paper (see Chapter I) claiming that hippocampal lesions produced amnesia, E. Grastyan of the University of Pecs, in Hungary, published a study of hippocampal slow wave activity during learning in freely moving cats¹. Grastyan and his colleagues reported that hippocampal rhythmical slow waves were characteristic of the early stages of learning when the cats displayed prominent orienting reactions (the what-is-it reflexes of Pavlov) but that both the orienting responses and the associated rhythmical slow waves disappeared when the learned behavior had become well established. Soon afterwards, W.R. Adey of the University of California at Los Angeles began publishing the results of a series of studies making use of computers to analyze changes in hippocampal slow waves during learning.