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Navigation without the hippocampus

By dmunger on February 7, 2007.

Mind Hacks has an excellent review of a case study that appears to contradict some "common knowledge" about the brain:

The hippocampus is thought to be essential for navigation. Surprisingly, a paper published last year reported that a London Taxi driver, who suffered hippocampus damage on both sides of the brain, could successfully navigate around much of London.

If the hippocampus is required, than how can we navigate without it? The researchers believe they have an answer for that as well:

They tested the driver in a complete computer simulation of London (pictured left) and discovered, to their surprise, that he was surprisingly good at orienting himself in the city and navigating the main roads.

He often became lost, however, when he moved away from the main roads and had to rely on smaller roads for navigation.

This suggests that the hippocampus is necessary for the fine-grained knowledge of locations rather than navigation in total.

Excellent research, which also demonstrates that generalizations such as "the hippocampus is responsible for navigation" vastly oversimplify what's actually going on in the brain. Once we localize a process, we still need to know how it functions -- and how those functions, nearly always, interact with other processes in the brain.

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But don't we use different orientation methods in different situations. In the big streets, the driver relies on memory of the place (what is left, what is two bloks down, etc.) which is not navigation proper. Once he is outsise of areas he has memorizes, he actually has to start orienting/navigating and then he starts failing.

I bet if hippocampus was removed from a bird after it was trained in a maze, the bird would do fine in the maze, but would be lost trying to find its migratory paty, and may not be able to leanr a new maze.