An Accidental Journey Into the Black Hole of the Hippocampus and How We Learned About What Makes a Context a Context

In this commentary, I recount my personal research journey that brought me to studying the hippocampus, which I vigorously avoided earlier in my career. I focus on studies of contextual fear conditioning and how they led me in this direction. The adventure was largely unplanned and driven by several findings that were unanticipated when the experiments were initially designed. Because I sometimes chose not to publish the studies in the order that they were completed, and journals have variable publication lags, the discovery process is not immediately apparent from reading the literature in the order that things were published. In a general sense, the chronology shows how well-established ideas may obscure discovery, but a readiness to abandon and replace them when the data lead you elsewhere is a catalyst to better understanding. In this case, that understanding is what makes a context a unique stimulus and why we need the hippocampus to deal with that uniqueness.