Hippocampus Research Programme

Type: project Slug: project—hippocampus-research Sources: deconstructing-episodic-memory-with-construction—hassabis, patients-with-hippocampal-amnesia-cannot-imagine-new-experiences—hassabis, the-construction-system-of-the-brain—hassabis, using-imagination-to-understand-the-neural-basis-of-episodic-memory—hassabis, imagine-all-the-people-how-the-brain-creates-and-uses-personality-models—hassabis, decoding-neuronal-ensembles-in-the-human-hippocampus—hassabis, decoding-individual-episodic-memory-traces-in-the-human-hippocampus—hassabis, tracking-the-emergence-of-conceptual-knowledge-during-human-decision-making—hassabis, semantic-representations-in-the-temporal-pole-predict-false-memories—hassabis, computations-underlying-social-hierarchy-learning—hassabis, neural-mechanisms-of-hierarchical-planning-in-a-virtual-subway-network—hassabis, big-loop-recurrence-within-the-hippocampal-system-supports-integration-of-information-across-episodes—hassabis Last updated: 2026-05-13

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Summary

The hippocampus research programme is the longest-running project in the corpus (2007–2019), spanning 12 publications across the PhD period, postdoc, and two additional papers in the DeepMind era. Based primarily at UCL’s Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging (Maguire lab), the programme established the hippocampal construction hypothesis — that the hippocampus constructs episodic representations by recombining stored elements — and provided evidence from lesion studies, fMRI, and single-neuron recordings.

Core content

Phase 1 — Construction (2007–2009, period—phd-period): 9 papers establishing the hypothesis. The amnesia-imagination finding (paper—patients-with-hippocampal-amnesia-cannot-imagine-new-experiences) was the breakthrough. The BBS target article (paper—deconstructing-episodic-memory-with-construction) and Phil Trans B review (paper—the-construction-system-of-the-brain) provided the theoretical framework. Single-neuron recordings (paper—decoding-neuronal-ensembles-in-the-human-hippocampus) and ensemble decoding (paper—decoding-individual-episodic-memory-traces-in-the-human-hippocampus) provided neural evidence.

Phase 2 — Extension (2016, period—deepmind-ascent): 2 papers extending the framework to new domains — social hierarchy learning (paper—computations-underlying-social-hierarchy-learning) and false memory prediction (paper—semantic-representations-in-the-temporal-pole-predict-false-memories). Both used the construction framework to make novel predictions.

Phase 3 — Integration (2016, 2019): Hierarchical planning (paper—neural-mechanisms-of-hierarchical-planning-in-a-virtual-subway-network) connected hippocampal construction to planning. Big-loop recurrence (paper—big-loop-recurrence-within-the-hippocampal-system-supports-integration-of-information-across-episodes) extended the framework to cross-episode integration — the most technically ambitious paper in the programme.

Primary lab: Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL. Eleanor A. Maguire was the supervisor and primary collaborator.

Connections

• Theme: theme—hippocampal-construction, theme—memory-imagination, theme—episodic-memory
• Periods: period—phd-period (9 papers), period—postdoc-period (1), period—deepmind-ascent (2), period—alphafold-era (1)
• Collaborators: Eleanor A. Maguire (primary, 6 papers), Catriona D. Bruce (2), Raymond Dolan (1), Dharshan Kumaran (3), Neil Burgess (1)

Honest Gaps

• The programme wound down after 2019 with no explanation in the corpus.
• No animal model work — all human neuroimaging/lesion/single-neuron.
• The BBS commentary responses (which would show how the field received the hypothesis) are not in the corpus.
• No formal collaboration with computational neuroscientists or AI researchers during the PhD period — the neuroscience-AI bridge came later.