What is Subiculum?

The year before I left Berkeley, I took a course called IB 245 - Functional Neuroanatomy. The professor, Marian Diamond, taught in a small room on the north side of campus, evocative of the one used by Dr. Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Her teaching tools were decidedly (and intentionally) low-tech.

She employed only a tandem of projectors--one 35mm slide projector, and one overhead projector (on which she wrote with colored pens while lecturing). That was all she needed. She had the rare ability to make everything interesting, and things already interesting, fascinating. If that wasn’t enough, the lab section allowed us the privilege to work twice a week on real human brains donated to the University. It was here that I got my introduction to the subiculum (pronunciation), a small but important part of human neuroanatomy.

The subiculum is situated between the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex, regions essential to memory formation, consolidation, and optimization. Unusually, it “has a range of electro-physiological and functional properties which are quite distinct from its input areas; given the widespread set of cortical and subcortical areas with which it interacts, it is able to influence activity in quite disparate brain regions.” (O’Mara, 2005) Of particular interest to me was the way in which the array of inputs are structured as they funnel into the subiculum, before returning to regions where they originated, as shown in Figure 1.

It’s an imperfect analogy, but in a way the structure resembles a recursive process, with the subiculum acting as the final node. The concept of this structure as a kind of systematic support for the hippocampus is what led me to choose it as the name of this website.

As I contemplated what I wanted to do with a personal web page, the functional parallels were evident. I felt increasingly bogged down by the deluge of information de rigueur in modern life. I needed a way to process, to emphasize the useful or interesting stuff, and to de-emphasize/discard the chaff. Figure 2 offers a very rough approximation on how I intend for this process to work.