hippocampus, or, isn't it cool what you find when you look stuff up?

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Gotta love what you can find out, nowadays, and how easy it all is to find.

I'm listening to Learning How to Learn, and one of the instructors is talking about what he's calling neuromodulators -- acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin.

It occurred to me that I'd been wondering about the hippocampus.  Like -- is there one, or are there two? 

So I googled hippocampus, and then looked at the images.

At this point, I'm guessing that the answer to "one, or two?" is "welllllllllllllllllllll........."

(According to Wikipedia, the image above is public domain, so I'm feeling ok with copying it and sharing it.)


My main point for this post is -- WOW, what you can see if you google hippocampus and look at the images!

So many different ways of looking at all of this, from slices through actual brains from various different angles, to all sorts of different ways artists have represented these structures and all the stuff that surrounds them!

So cool, to be able to see so many different representations -- I am sure I have a much better and deeper understanding of all of this because I have been able to look at so many different images!  This is a HUGE improvement over olden times, when I would have had to find a book, and then look at whatever images they wanted to show me in that book.  Even if I found several books, the results of my search for images would have been much, much sparser. 

It's hard to overemphasize how HUGE this improvement is. 

In olden times, I would have read a book (or gone to a lecture), and would have had to go to the library for more books, if I wanted to see more images.  I would have had to carry the books to a table, and find the images I wanted to see in each book.  Then I would have replaced the books, and returned home.

Now, I can look it up, see what I was wondering about from dozens of different perspectives, and decide to write a blog post about it, in less time than it would have taken me to put on "going out" clothes to get ready to go to the library!

This is truly a most excellent time for a curious person to be alive!

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