For learning to occur, you must store the memories your brain encodes.  The neurons in your cerebral cortex gather the new information which it then sends as impulses through neural pathways you learned about in Lesson 1.2.  Those pathways reach all the way to the hippocampus, which is located deep within the temporal lobe and is the area of the brain that helps regulates emotions and memories.

The hippocampus receives your new memories and sends them back to the cortex, the outer layer of your brain. When you remember and repeat those memories, they pass through the hippocampus several times.  This process strengthens all of the associations between the reference points that are created during complex encoding.  As the associations are strengthened, they become memories.

Without the processing by the hippocampus, you would have no memory at all; the events of each day would be lost. Without it, you would not remember your family, your name, or even recognize your own image in the mirror.  The memory of your new experiences would last for a few moments but never long enough to become a lasting memory.