Hippocampus and consciousness

An important assumption concerning the physiology of consciousness is that all varieties of conscious experience are closely related to each other and, hence, are subserved by the same neural mechanism. There are several considerations that lead us to implicate the hippocampus in the generation of conscious perception and, ultimately, of conscious experiences of all kinds. Firstly, conscious perception of external events is intricately linked with the formation of episodic (declarative) memories, a key function attributed to the hippocampus. Secondly, conscious experience is allocentric and contextualized. Consciousness creates or simulates an image of the world that appears to surround us and to be independent of our observation of it. What is characteristic of wakeful consciousness and dreaming alike is that objects or events are experienced as being embedded in an external, that is, allocentric, frame of space and time. The hippocampus has been implicated in the rapid formation and memorization of allocentric representations that embed objects or events in a world context. Thirdly, the hippocampus is ideally positioned to bind information processed in different sensory association cortices. It is argued that rapidly forming patterns of neuronal ensemble firing in the hippocampus, particularly in region CA3, which encode arbitrary associations between objects and their spatiotemporal and emotional context, that is, associations between information derived from different neocortical processing streams, define the informational content of consciousness. Evidence suggestive of an important contribution of the hippocampus to conscious observation, mental imagery, dreaming, conscious anticipation of outcomes, and hallucinations will be reviewed.