Hippocampus and imagination

A recent paper by Hassabis et al. (2007, PNAS, 104, 1726-31) reports that amnesic patients with hippocampal damage show an improverished ability to imagine new situations. Most particularly, amnesics reported poor spatial coherence, tending to experience fragmentary sensations instead of a holistic scene. Participants were not explicitly asked to imagine themselves 'in the future', but this task shares similarities with future thinking.