Life, the Hippocampus, and Everything

This paper describes my history of exposure and contributions to behavioral neuroscience, especially to the role of the hippocampus in learning and memory. Through a series of accidents and opportunities, and after priming in the graduate student environment of hippocampus and memory at Dalhousie University in the Department of Psychology, my work on the topic started at the University of Lethbridge, evaluating place navigation in Richard Morris' swimming pool task with Bryan Kolb and Ian Whishaw. We made a number of experimental and theoretical contributions, most important among these was the evaluation of the deficits caused by hippocampal damage on place learning and memory, recent versus remote memory, configural associations, and extensions to human memory. We describe some missteps and how we picked ourselves up and continued on.