In early 2007, Demis Hassabis, computer game designer and neuroscientist, conducted a study using subjects whose hippocampus, commonly known as the brain’s filing cabinet, had been severely damaged, causing hippocampal amnesia. Patients with this condition struggle to imagine new events. Hassabis suggests that the hippocampus, in addition to playing a substantial role in the operations of remembering events, is also called upon when imagining events. Our brains access stored “abstract knowledge” for both reconstructions of past events and entirely new constructions of imagined ones. Through Hasssabis’s theory, which is arguably the first to objectively focus on the neuropsychology of imagining events, one could suggest that the hippocampus plays a significant role in the construction of literature-reaching backward into our deepest experiences and forward into our most one-of-a-kind imaginings.

In this issue, you will find writing that is experimental and writing about experiments. Thank you to everyone who had a hand in completing this issue and to our contributors’ and readers’ hippocampi.