Parahippocampal gyrus

Information about Parahippocampal gyrus

Medial surface of left cerebral hemisphere. ("Hippocampal gyrus" visible near bottom.)
Parahippocampal gyrus labeled at bottom center.
Latingyrus parahippocampalis
MeSH Parahippocampal+Gyrus
Dorlands/Elsevier g_13/14816442
The parahippocampal gyrus (or hippocampal gyrus) is a grey matter cortical region of the brain that surrounds the hippocampus. This region plays an important role in memory encoding and retrieval. The anterior part of the gyrus includes the perirhinal and entorhinal cortices. The term parahippocampal cortex is used to refer to an area that encompasses both the posterior portion of the parahippocampal gyrus and the medial portion of the fusiform gyrus.

The parahippocampal place area (PPA) is a subregion of the parahippocampal cortex that plays an important role in the encoding and recognition of scenes (rather than faces or objects). fMRI studies indicate that this region of the brain becomes highly active when human subjects view topographical scene stimuli such as images of landscapes, cityscapes, or rooms (i.e. images of "places"). The region was first described by Russell Epstein (currently at the University of Pennsylvania) and Nancy Kanwisher (currently at MIT) in 1998 ([1], see also other similar reports by Geoffrey Aguirre [2] and Alumit Ishai [3]). Damage to the PPA (for example, due to stroke) often leads to a syndrome in which patients cannot visually recognize scenes even though they can recognize the individual objects in the scenes (such as people, furniture, etc.). The PPA is often considered the complement of the fusiform face area (FFA), a nearby cortical region that responds strongly whenever faces are viewed, and which is believed to be important for face recognition.

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Coronal section


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Latin}}} 
Official status
Official language of: Vatican City
Used for official purposes, but not spoken in everyday speech
Regulated by: Opus Fundatum Latinitas
Roman Catholic Church
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ISO 639-1: la
ISO 639-2: lat
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Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is a huge controlled vocabulary (or metadata system) for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books in the life sciences. Created and updated by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), it is used by the MEDLINE/PubMed
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Elsevier, the world's largest publisher of medical and scientific literature, forms part of the Reed Elsevier group. Based in Amsterdam, the company has substantial operations in the UK, USA and elsewhere.
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cerebral cortex is a structure within the vertebrate brain with distinct structural and functional properties. In non-living, preserved brains, the outermost layers of the cerebrum has a grey color, hence the name "grey matter".
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In animals, the brain or encephalon (Greek for "in the skull"), is the control center of the central nervous system, responsible for behavior. The brain is located in the head, protected by the skull and close to the primary sensory apparatus of vision, hearing,
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The hippocampus is a part of the forebrain, located in the medial temporal lobe. It forms a part of the limbic system and plays a part in memory and spatial navigation. Humans and other mammals have two hippocampi, one in each side of the brain.
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In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and subsequently retrieve information. Traditional studies of memory began in the realms of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing the memory.
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In the study of memory, encoding is the processing of physical sensory input into one's memory. It is considered the first of three steps in memory information processing; the remaining two steps are storage and retrieval.
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Perirhinal cortex is a cortical region in the medial temporal lobe that is made up of Brodmann areas 35 and 36. In rats, it is located along and dorsal to the rhinal sulcus.
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The entorhinal cortex (EC) is an important memory center in the brain. The EC forms the main input to the hippocampus and is responsible for the pre-processing (familiarity) of the input signals.
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Fusiform means having a spindle-like shape that is wide in the middle and tapers at both ends.
  • Aneurysms can be classified as saccular or fusiform
  • In botany, a fusiform cell or other plant structure is spindle-like and tapers at both ends

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Recognition (re+cognition) is a process that occurs in thinking when some event, process, pattern, or object recurs. Thus in order for something to be recognized, it must be familiar. This recurrence allows the recognizer to more properly react, survival value.
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Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is the use of MRI to measure the haemodynamic response related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or other animals. It is one of the most recently developed forms of neuroimaging.
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Nancy Kanwisher is a Professor in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. She studies the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying human visual perception and cognition.
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The Fusiform face area (FFA) is a part of the human visual system which seems to specialize in facial recognition.

The FFA is located in the ventral stream on the ventral surface of the temporal lobe on the fusiform gyrus.
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NeuroNames is a system of nomenclature for the human and/or macaque brain.

It is maintained by the University of Washington and is a part of a tool called "BrainInfo". BrainInfo helps one identify structures in the brain.
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