Decades of research with rats had convinced some scientists that long–term spatial memories are in the hippocampus, a structure in the temporal lobes of the brain. Larry Squire of VA Medical Center in San Diego, California and his colleagues learned otherwise when they examined a 76-year –old amnesia patient whose hippocampus had damaged by illness. The team probed the patient’s ability to find his way around the area where he lived as a boy, even though ‘he hasn’t retained any information about the neighborhood he lives in now,’ says squire. Then he put to the same test five others who had grown up in the area and moved away. The patient performed as well as his former neighbors in mentally navigating his childhood streets. Spatial memories initially depend on the hippocampus, Squire concluded, but eventually they are stored outside that region.