HippoMaps: Charting the Brain’s Memory Centre

If you think “HippoMaps” has something to do with a safari, think again. This “Hippo” doesn’t wade through rivers, it resides deep within the brain. The hippocampus is the control centre for memory and learning, and an international research team has now given it its very own map: “HippoMaps”, a freely accessible software toolbox that makes the intricate folds of this crucial brain region visible and comparable.

Developed within the German-Canadian project HIBALL (Helmholtz International BigBrain Analytics and Learning Laboratory) – with contributions from the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) at Forschungszentrum Jülich, led by JARA-BRAIN scientist Professor Katrin Amunts, the tool brings together data from a range of imaging techniques, including high-resolution histology, 3D-Polarised Light Imaging, MRI and EEG recordings.

By integrating these diverse data sources, HippoMaps helps researchers better understand the hippocampus’s structure and function across multiple scales, from cellular organisation to activity in the living brain. This, in turn, provides new insights into conditions such as dementia and epilepsy, while also inspiring the development of brain-inspired AI systems designed to learn as humans do.

The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Methods.
Further information is available on the Forschungszentrum Jülich website: https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/news/archive/highlights/2025/hippocampus-research