The hippocampus is particularly engaged by spatial navigation and in remembering the location of things in space. (Each person actually has two hippocampi, one on each side of the brain.) For instance, species of birds that store food in different places and thus must be able to remember the location of these various caches have relatively larger hippocampi than closely related birds that don’t store food in different places. More to the point, the size of the hippocampus is quite flexible in at least some species of birds and can grow by as much as 30 percent in response to a bird’s
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