The hippocampus has an important role in imagining the future.
Clinicopathologic correlations of behavior and brain lesions have historically provided important insights in neuropsychiatry and behavioral neurology — e.g., language centers (Broca aphasia and Wernicke aphasia) and function of the frontal lobe in personality (the case of Phineas Gage). Hippocampal damage is associated with impaired episodic memory and recall of past events, but does it have a role in imagining new events? These researchers asked 5 patients with bilateral hippocampal damage and 10 control subjects (matched for age, IQ, and education) to construct new imagined experiences.
Participants were given short verbal cues for seven “simple commonplace scenarios” and three possible future events; they were asked to feel physically pr…