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One of the things that intrigues me about Zacks’ work is precisely the light it sheds on the hippocampus. Conventional wisdom (based on research with rats’ brains, it turns out) is that this region of the brain is devoted to spatial orientation and  long term memory.   This is what a neuroscientist friend of mine told me in the ’80s, and it’s reflected in the Wikipedia article linked to above.  These two functions may appear to have no obvious relationship, but as a structural cultural anthropologist, it has always made sense to me — to my way of thinking, the hippocampus must be involved with the process of symbolization, the encoding of experiences into symbolic structures, many of whose structural armatures map onto spatial metaphors, such as left|right, up|down, etc.

Now what Zacks (or some recent research he builds on) adds to the picture is that the hippocampus also plays a role in segmentation where time perception and short term memory are in operation.  So there is some sense in which the proportion — short-term memory : time :: long-term memory : space — defines the functional economy of cognition.  I find this idea very interesting because (1) it correlates memory with ontology, and (2) it’s the opposite of what you might think — surely time perception (perception beyond the present) involves long-term memory, and space perception would scaffold  short-term memory.  Perhaps in the transduction of experience into memory, such a reversal is necessary.  (Or perhaps this view is the product of too philosophical a mind, one prone to seeing connections between abstractions where there are none.)