It is also generally acknowledged that one of the main contributing factors to catastrophic
interference is the overlapping nature of the network’s internal representations. Decreasing
representational overlap results in a decrease in catastrophic forgetting. This fact led
McClelland, McNaughton, & O'Reilly (1995) to suggest that the way the brain overcomes
catastrophic interference was by having separate processing areas, the hippocampus and the
neocortex. They suggested that new information arrives at the hippocampus and is learned
there first, away from previously learned information, before being consolidated in the
neocortex. Neocortical consolidation is done by the hippocampus slowly training the
neocortex