A Hippocampal Halloween

Happy Halloween! We LOVE visiting King Elementary in Northeast Portland, and couldn’t have chosen a better date to return!

Halloween will forever be on our schedule for future Noggin school outreach, and King is one of our favorite and most memorable community connections.

Memory and the Brain

Certain kinds of memory, of course – as several of the more than 200 costumed and curious elementary school students we met with already knew – rely on a brain structure known as the hippocampus.

When you remember a past experience (say, when you recall seeing Wednesday Adams contemplating a vibrant 3D noggin), and mentally reconstruct where you were, how that space relates to known locations, who was there and what you and others did – you engage your hippocampus, along with networked brain regions deep in your temporal lobes!

LEARN MORE: Viewpoints: how the hippocampus contributes to memory, navigation and cognition

LEARN MORE: Is memory physical?

We visited King in 2022, to share noggins, make art and consider some deep questions.

LEARN MORE: King Cortex

Halloween at King

This time we presented with Dr. Philberta Y. Leung’s reproductive sciences lab from the OHSU National Primate Research Center. Phil and members of her lab, including Kaya Burd, Chris Celluci, Jenna Castro, Olivia Hagen, Brady Wessel and Shuhao Wei joined us at King with some extraordinary primate brains to share with students!

We were also joined at King by a crowd of Interdisciplinary Neuroscience and Psychology undergraduates from Portland State University, including Arlene Lopez, Abubakar Nur, Kasey Judd, Alexandria Bills, Alex Heinrich, Hailey Trieu, Ethan Mell, Andy Ng, Shelby Wilkinson, Jennie Terranova, Angie Briones, Martin Lemke and Lauren Campbell.